Silver Dollar City, Day One, Continued

If you ever go to Silver Dollar City, it is advisable to bring a stroller if you have a small child, as it is a very large park.  It is also good because then you have a place to store a small cooler and/or your lunch, and lots of snacks.  If you don't need a stroller for kids, but still want to bring in a cooler or lunch, there are lockers at the entrance you can use for a small fee.  I would recommend that over leaving stuff at your car, even though you can leave and come back in the same day.  It takes a while to get out to your car and there are no picnic areas that I could see at the parking lots.  As far as what to do with the stroller if the whole family wants to ride a ride, people would simply leave their strollers (with no valuables in them, of course) by the entrance to the ride.  We never had a problem with that.  Each ride also had cubby holes that only the ride attendants had access to during the ride, so if you had a purse or hat or something, you could leave it there during the ride. 

In one area of the park, there is a giant play house which was 3-4 stories high, with multiple levels and lots of fun things to do, like in this picture.  There were several net climbing tunnels that went up and down different levels as well as spiral slides.  A fun, fun place for our kids.

There was a large open area in the middle, and a lot of the levels had these air gun things which would shoot out foam balls that you loaded into them.

Then at the bottom of the big open area was all kinds of ways to "clean-up" the balls, which all the kids had a blast with.  It was a clever way to keep the balls in circulation because they would get sucked up and distributed to the various ball containers around the place.

I need one of these at my house to suck up all the toys!

Anthony could have sat here for hours putting the balls in the tube.

This was a small roller coaster that Anthony could ride on with an adult.  It was little, so you got to ride around 3 times and then it would stop with a big jolt.  I have to say, some of the rides for little kids were a tight squeeze for adults.

The kids loved the little roller coaster, especially Anthony.  When I rode with him, I just sat and watched him grinning and laughing. 

Riding in the teacups.  I first went with the four big kids, then the next day we all rode, because you could control the spinning of your cup by the wheel in the middle.  We didn't touch the wheel, so we got a nice, non puke-inducing ride.

There were several rides in this same area designed for little kids.  This was a cute frog ride where each frog would make a hopping motion up and down.  I rode behind Anthony just to make sure he wouldn't try to unbuckle his seat belt, otherwise he would have been fine by himself.

This ride got the honor of us dubbing it the tamest ride in the park.  Anthony liked it though.

As you can see, the other kids did not think it was that great.

We were at Silver Dollar City from a little after 10:00 until around 4:00 that first day.  The kids did really well, even Anthony for the most part.  He did fall asleep for a good while in the stroller during the afternoon, so that was nice.  After we left the park, we drove back to the hotel, and everyone relaxed and then I made dinner in our little kitchen.  Of course, later, we went swimming in the hotel pool.  A fun end to a fun day!