Keith Bell is a student at Mayo Demonstration Elementary School. His school is among those whose students have been allowed to “test out” Tulsa’s Gathering Place park ahead of its summer 2018 opening.
Bell, 6, who traveled to the park last week, wrote a review of his experience for The Frontier.
I hadn’t heard about the Gathering Place before, really, but I was excited to go because they said it was going to be really fun and also because I got to wear jeans and get out of school.
When you first walk in, you kind of have to turn and then there’s a giant wooden bear. There’s a lot of big things there.
Climbing way higher than the ground was the best part. There were lots of places to climb and get really high.
There were two huge slides — one of them was the biggest I’ve ever seen. You climb up in the castle way up there and then you go across a bridge and then you’ll get to the slide. The slide goes through a big elephant thing that’s made of wood. It was fun, I rode it probably seven times.
That was the most fun, I had never seen anything like that before.
The castle was a lot of fun too, they took my picture in front of it. I really liked to go all the way to the top so I did that a lot.
There was also a giant swan that you can get in and a forest made out of trees and leaves. There’s also this maze that you can go in and people can’t see you. Someone thought I was in the middle of the maze, but I was actually at the end.
I was really excited to see what was there. There was a zip line that looked really fun and a giant spider web that was really made of rope that you could climb on.
We didn’t really know what it would be like but my friends and I were talking a lot about the park after. We all said the other parks we’ve been too are way smaller.
I think other kids will like it when it’s open and they get to go.