As you pull into the car park at HollyBush recreation grounds you will see The Lodge Coffee Shop, a great place to grab a coffee after a workout with Fitmums (postnatal exercise with your baby) or to keep warm when you have to get out of the house in the Winter months.
To the left is an all weather astro-turf pitch which I have played hockey on many many years ago (primary school). Past the coffee shop are the tennis courts, and to the right you have the local indoor and outdoor bowls clubs. My Dad plays for the indoor club, you may see him mentioned occasionally in the local newspaper (The Chronicle), they play in lots of tournaments all over Kent. Actually, they are looking for players so why not check it out, they need some new blood.
If you walk around the coffee shop you will come to the main attraction (for the kids at least), a small but beautiful playground surrounded on all four sides with a gated fence (an absolute must for my 3 year old).
It was a cold day that I took these photos, and William was not excited at all about playing. We whisked him up to HollyBush on a cold weekend afternoon to make sure he could use up enough energy to get him to bed early but he fell asleep in the car and was very grumpy when we got there. We walked over to the bowls club to see Grandad play and show off the baby to all the other players, and then practically had to drag William over to the playground. He wanted to be back in the warm at home watching the Chipmunk movie. Did I also mention that the Bowls Club has a new cook, and meals are available if you want something more than the Lodge has to offer for lunch.
There is play equipment available for the older and younger kids. The play equipment shown above is a little small for William now, but great for those that have just started to walk. There are also baby swings and one of the ones that is a big concave circle that babies can lie on to swing (if you wait for the teenagers to get off that is).
For the bigger kids there are swings, a zip line and this climbing structure. Some of the climbing is actually quite hard as my husband is demonstrating (William is still refusing to participate), this is the medium sized slide.
There is a bigger slide, but it's really hard to get to. I think you either need to have really long legs to climb the ladder rungs, or use the monkey bars and then swing you entire weight up into the tree house structure in order to go down the slide, neither of which I can do. This is how William uses the slide:
Up he goes
Higher and higher
And now we go home
I do wonder sometimes who decides what is placed in each playground and whether anyone actually tests them out before they are built. There must be some superstar playground testers out there that could win gold at the olympics if they can get onto this slide easily.
William was so grumpy that he wouldn't even play on his favourite roundabout.
I've never seen this playground empty, and in the Summer the area just buzzes with the kids and parents drinking coffee. Most weekday mornings there are more than one exercise class going on in the play field, and it's just minutes from the centre of Sevenoaks. It's an oldie but a goodie, I used to play there as a kid and now bring my two to play (I'm so glad they improved upon the equipment I used to play on in the 80's).
For more information about my family or the local resources in Sevenoaks click here.
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