One of my favorite parts of living in the Dayton, OH area is the amazing parks and trails that we have here. I don’t know if this is just typical American 21st century, or if this area really is exceptional in what they have to offer, but I do know that I didn’t have anything like this when I was growing up!
I do remember when we lived in the States, we would spend time outside and we would often find some fun hiking trails to tackle as a family. We lived in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, and there were endless amounts of woods and hills to explore.
But it wasn’t until I had kids of my own that I really fell in love with hiking and just being outside. There is something about the fresh air and nature play that makes my kids (and me!) more calm, settled, collaborative, and entertained! We suffer through the winters but then we have mostly amazing weather from May-September and our family takes full advantage of being outside as much as possible during those months!
This blog post is for my locals who aren’t sure what parks or trails there are, and need some motivation to get outside and get going! Before we dive into the various links and challenge that the Dayton area is providing, I just wanted to share some of the other blog posts I have written on this topic, as they may be a helpful resource to you!
I Won’t Carry That (and 9 other rules for hiking with kids)
Hiking Challenge: A Hike Every Day for 1 Month
Favorite Hiking Trails in the Dayton Area
This year we have decided to embark on the 51 Parks Challenge through the Centerville-Washginton Township Park District. This is a fun scavenger hunt type challenge where you need to find all 51 parks and take a picture with the owl at each park. I upload the pictures to an app and they are approved. Once we complete all 51 parks, we will earn a picnic prize! We are about halfway through this challenge. At first, we were visiting the parks one at a time and it was taking us a very long time. We found that some of the parks were epic and some of them were simple neighborhood parks with just a playground and swings. Since it was taking us so long, I finally got smart and printed off a map and we now hit up 2-3 parks in the same general location. We hop out, take our picture, and if something stands out as interesting to us we stay to play for a few minutes. One thing that we do love about this challenge is that we never know what we are going to find at the park! Will it be a big park with giant slides? Or a tiny little neighborhood park with a surprise creek? Will it be a hiking trail or will it be a skatepark with a billion teen boys, one wearing a t-shirt that proudly declares “I LOVE HOT MOMS” (true story). We love having adventures, and this challenge has provided the best type of adventure!
If Centerville seems too far or your kids are too advanced for playground play, don’t forget to check out the other local county parks and trails in the area. Make your own family scavenger hunt with a fun reward at the end for visiting all of them!
Greene County Parks and Trails
Five Rivers Metroparks List of Parks
Five Rivers MetroParks Outdoor Challenge (this one has some advanced aspects of the challenge like kayaking trails, bike paths, and horseback riding. Still doable with kids, but not exactly geared towards kids)
I am hoping to finish up the 51 parks challenge this summer before we head back to school in August. We are only about halfway through the challenge, but we have finally reached a time in our schedule that allows for a few solid hours of free time each day. We are also attempting to do the 1000 hours outside challenge, although I haven’t been doing a very good job of tracking that. My goal each summer day is to spend 4+ hours outside daily, and as long as it doesn’t rain, we tend to easily hit that mark. My problem is that sometimes we are in-n-out of the house, playing in the backyard, and then inside, and I don’t know if I can count those hours as indoors or outdoors ha!
If outdoors-ing isn’t quite your thing, maybe a library scavenger hunt would be more up your alley? Hit up all the various branches of your local library- I didn’t realize that my Dayton Metro Library had so many branches, and I also know that Greene County has several! This would also make a fun challenge for rainy summer days- ahem, I’m looking at you, next week, with rain in the forecast each day.
Dayton Metro Library Branches and Locations
Greene County Library Branches and Locations
I’m excited to complete some of these challenges and hopefully be back with an updated blog post of all 51+ parks that we have visited this summer! Let me know if you decide to join any of the challenges and what you learn along the way.