Our grand tour of San Diego's parks begins!

We recently decided that we are stuck in a rut when it comes to places to go in San Diego. We don't have a lot of spending money and with Kellen we are limited to going places where he won't have a meltdown. So, we end up going to the park and for walks around town for entertainment. Since we both grew up here we have certain places that we like to go and we haven't branched out much to see what else is out there. San Diego county is really big and there are so many parts of town that we have never explored. I went on the website yelp.com that has reviews of just about anything relating to the city you are searching. So I found a ton of parks and interesting places to explore, most of which are free. Now we have a "Johnson Family Fun List" of new places to visit. 

Our first outing on the list was to Pioneer Park in Mission Hills which is only a couple of miles from our house. It is such a strange little gem of San Diego history. It is tucked away in this awesome neighborhood filled with lots of old, beautiful (and ridiculously expensive) homes. The park has a large grass area shaded by big old trees, an awesome playground and a just your run of the mill rows of headstones! The park is actually an old graveyard filled with some of San Diego's first citizens. Apparently the city or whoever owned the land was not keeping up the graveyard so they moved the headstones to a corner of the property and turned the rest of it into a park. It is right next to an elementary school and they added a playground and bathrooms. No bodies were actually disturbed as far as I know only their headstones were moved. It is such a surreal space.  Kids are having birthday parties and groups are picnicking and then you look over and there is this whole area filled with very old tombstones.

woooohoooooo!

birthdays and graves!

crawling over old graves....so spooky!


Stay tuned for more Johnson family fun list adventures!