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Throughout the year we'll hear from eight bloggers as they share about their family's time in the Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience® and how it inspires them to explore these sports back at home.
This post was written by Children's Museum Blog Ambassador Mary Graham. Follow her posts on her blog, Trusty Chucks, or follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
It’s go time, friends.
The weather is turning colder, and the trees are starting their slow shedding of leaves and color. We’re closing in on the end of our first season of the Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience® and so our family is cramming in one last trip (or two) to the outdoor experiences before they hang up the cleats and jerseys for the season on November 4.
(Important tip: The three indoor exhibits do stay open all year—The World of Sport, History of Hoops, and the National Art Museum of Sports—o you can still get your sports experience fix when the Indy Fuel Hockey Experience is actually covered in ice in the middle of January.) But we'll have all winter to play indoors. For now, back to the great outdoors!...
If you haven’t made it to the inaugural season of the sports experience, you’ve only got a little time left. It’s worth a last-minute trip downtown. You can visit the Grim-nasium Haunted House in the morning, grab lunch at the food court, and then spend the afternoon running, racing, shooting, golfing, and kicking. Your kids will sleep well after a visit to the museum, I promise. (When our girls were toddlers, that was one sure way to get them to bed early at night: an afternoon trip to The Children’s Museum.)
Feeling the pressure to spend one last day at the sports experience before the season ends? The Graham girls, experts on play, recommend these stops on your final trip around the Experience:
- Begin at the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever Basketball Experience. Warm up with some passing and shooting, then challenge your friends (or your dad) to the shot-clock basket to see who can hit the most before the buzzer sounds.
- Then make your way to the Seymour and Rheta Holt Tennis Center to see how long you can keep a ball going back-and-forth over the net. Play singles or doubles, but try not to hit it out!
- Next head to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Pedal Car Racetrack Experience to race. Pedal hard, those cars are a workout! Make sure the winner poses for a picture in the winner’s circle. You’ll need to bring your own gallon of milk though.
- After your race celebration, grab some golf clubs and balls and pick a course on the Pete and Alice Dye Golf Experience for a relaxing (and competitive) round of golf. Make sure to keep score and be weary of that family member who always seems to get creative with the score.
- As a cooldown, take a lap around the Fitness Path and Run-Walk Track. This doesn’t seem to be the most popular attraction outside, but our family loves all the fitness stops and fun things to play on. Plus, if we still had small babies, walking this course with a sleeping baby in a stroller would be my favorite way to spend the afternoon.
Plus, walking around the path gives you a great view of all the other sports you can play on your next visit or when the outdoor areas of the sports experience opens up again in the spring. But if I were you, I wouldn’t wait, I’d get them all in one last time before it gets too cold to feel your face.
