I would love to go back to being a kid. I had a great childhood, with a lot of good memories. Yes there were the rough times but overall I can't say
that I had it bad growing up. I lived in a town where there were lots of kids in the same age bracket and all were outside kids. I remember using the
whole town to play tag on bikes, or flash light tag at night time. The countless experiences at the park, from playing baseball, football, basketball,
etc but mostly using the park equipment not really in the way you're supposed to such as: Having contests on how high you can swing on the swing to
how far you can flip/jump off the swing, or climbing up a big twist slide to pull down whoever was hanging from the top of the slide and to win, you
would have to make them slide all the way off the slide. just silly stuff like that.
I remember me and my friends made use of this small patch of woods behind his house and would build some pretty good tree houses. We would spend the
whole summer building/rebuilding and improving it. We would have more than a couple of floors, a rope to climb, swing, etc a slide, swing. we even
made sure to set up a station to put a big sling shot (it was typically on the roof, but we liked to change things alot) and fire off rocks, water
balloons, toys, you name it. I remember many times the older kids would come shoot their paintball guns at us, so we always keep water balloons, jelly
balloons, as many squirt guns as we could get and the lone paintball gun we had to fight them off. (eventually as we got older we all saved our
allowances to get paintball guns). We also used to bring our toys, mostly G.I Joes (we actually did do this till we were 13 or 14 and were laughed at
but those laughing would always join) We'd build a ton of mini fortresses, armed with with countless twigs, water balloons, sling shots and have a
battle.
Building ramps with my friends and having little competitions with our bikes, as well as races were a lot of fun. We had this building and parking lot
right by where our tree house was that was a dump truck company and were always expanding by tearing down parts of our "little forest" to expand
their parking lot. So we would get them made by playing baseball there, and we would play ninja or commando by dressing the parts and "infiltrating"
the building looking for ways to bring them down. It always resulted in us running from employees. They did eventually suceed in wiping our our little
forest and built a fence around where the perimeter of the woods used to be. We also used to take turns using someones dirt bike on a course a lot of
the older neighborhood kids built in an open area. They did a good job with it. We even used regular bikes on that course and it was just as fun. I
used to wipe out all the time, dirt bike or regular bike.
There's also another area that was wasn't officially a forest preserve, but big enough to be one. The kids were forbidden to go there, so natually
we made many "treks" through it. There's a river that runs through it, a bridge for a train, hills, old burnt up abandaned cars. Making a "boat"
or raft to paddle on the river. Also, I don't know about anyone else here, but me and my friends used to love "ally treasure", you find find bikes,
wagons, wood for the tree house, thrown away TVs to break, any useless electronic equipment was always a favorite to smash up.We mostly took this
stuff to our treehouse, cause we did get in trouble for doing it in the ally. Lot of times people would throw away pieces and parts for bicycles and
we would always collect and build a bike with those parts, but one time we found one perfectly intact, except the wheel was bent, so we took it,
replaced the wheel and I rode for a test ride. My friends came along on their bikes, all was good one moment and the next I fell straight to the
ground while in motion. The frame was weak I guess from the whatever caused the bent wheel. We had a pretty good laugh. Good times!