Purchase the Guidebooks

How these books came to be

I stay at home with my kids during the summer, and in an attempt to help structure our time while keeping things fresh, I decided that we would visit every Boise City playground over the summer, hitting one per day. I quickly realized that I didn’t know much about many of the parks! 

Growing up I loved riding my bike to Winstead Park, and now we have a handful of parks near our house that we enjoy, but otherwise most playgrounds were a big unknown. There are parks that we LOVE due to the unique play features and safe set-up; there are other parks that are stressful because they aren’t a good fit for our family right now - poor sight lines or water nearby or too high of equipment for the little one. I thought it would be great to have one resource where parents could see what playgrounds are available in our beautiful city, and decide which ones would work best based on the needs of their own families.

I reached out to a few friends to brainstorm ideas for what parents might want to know, and came up with our first guidebook - Levi and Elena's Guide to Boise City Playgrounds. In it you’ll find a listing of all Boise City playgrounds - 52 of them! Each playground has its own entry, including the name and address, pictures of the space, a description, quotes and ratings from my kids, the lowdown from the mom perspective, and a list of features. We’ve also included a nickname for each park, because for some reason my kids can’t remember “Peppermint Park,” but they CAN remember “The School Bus Park!” 

We even created an index of all the playground features at the end of the book; so if your kid loves spiral slides and only wants a playground with a spiral slide, now you can see where to find them. Or if you want to take the #52ParkChallenge and try to visit all the playgrounds like we did, there is a checklist at the end to mark each off. The Maps section shows which parks are near each other. 

After the first summer and first guidebook, we knew we had to follow up with a guidebook for Meridian and Eagle! Adding in Kuna, Middleton, and Star resulted in a list of 31 playgrounds and another awesome summer creating our second guidebook. This summer we plan on visiting all the Nampa and Caldwell playgrounds to write our third! 

We've spent two whole summers now exploring and taking reconnaissance notes for these projects, and loved (almost) every minute of it. Whether you’ve lived in the Treasure Valley forever or are new to the area, I hope these guidebooks are helpful for you!