The TCD gang made a quick visit to the Fort on 5/28/09. I will start a little thread about some of the things we saw that afternoon, but here are the obligatory pool and splash zone photos. Not much different from clkelley's but I do have a couple of things of minor interest to point out. So, here you go:
Approaching from the bridge behind the Meadow Trading Post, you can see that some of the construction fencing is still up, so they are not quite done with the project:
I am pleased to see that the sidewalk will apparently remain in place. When the fences come down, this sidewalk will go around the perimeter of the pool, and all the way to the footbridge to the 1500 loop.
The golf cart parking area still has bike racks in it. It looks like this may be a permanent situation. As you can see, someone parked a cart here
Here you can see that there is now loose river rock in place on the outside of the splash zone fence, and there is a gate here. This gate, and the one on the other side, are controlled with a magnetic latch. This one was set so the latch would not operate. I'm not sure if that will normally be the case, or it was locked because the work isn't quite done:
Here's a look at the river rock, and a drain, and something else in the ground outside the splash zone:
The new equipment is now enclosed with a fence, as clkelley's photos show. But, you can still hold a camera over the fence to see what they have back there. See?:
That is a lot of stuff to operate the splash zone. This apparently will be running during the time the splash zone is open, which appears to be from 10 am to 10 pm daily.
Here are some folks enjoying the splash zone:
Looks like fun, right? Anybody see anything wrong in the photo? Me neither. These kids seemed to be having fun. Well, right after I snapped these photos, a young female lifeguard came over and told the kids to get out, because this area was for kids under 5! The sign the clkelley posted a photo of above says that children under 12 must be supervised by an adult. That would certainly suggest that children up to 12, and maybe over 12, can use the splash zone. So, what's up with this lifeguard? I don't know. But, I don't see anything wrong with kids over 5 using this stuff. In fact, I would say some kids under 5 shouldn't even be using this stuff, because they could get hurt. It seems like maybe they are already having problems with rough housing on the splash zone equipment, and they are arbitrarily limiting its use. Not so good.
Anybody remember the long metal pipe and big white pipes that were previously photographed? Well, none of that amounted to much. Here is the area where that work was going on:
If you look at the pavement here, you can see where they patched what they dug up to run the pipe across the asphalt:
It looks like that metal pipe was, indeed, a gas line, because this is what is in the area of where it terminated:
So, there must be a heater over there in the splash zone equipment, and the splash zone water will be heated.
I have a few more pool and splash zone photos, which I will post in just a sec.
TCD