Customer Reviews

Play Around the Bay: A Guide to Bay Area Outings for Families with Young Children

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book includes listings of every park, playground, museum and activity of interest to children 10 and under. As an adventurous mother of three, I couldn't live without my copy!

This book is absolutely fantastic and I use it so often that I need to buy another copy to leave in my car! Whenever I want to go on an outing with my kids, "Play Around The Bay' gives me all the pertinent information - as well as directions. It is extremely accurate. Some of our best adventures have come out of this book! I couldn't live (and preserve my sanity) without it.

This book might be great if you live in SF, but it is not good for the peninsula. It has some nice features, like the symbols, but I think your money is better spent on "babies by the bay" (keene & Lamarre).

This book is our bible for fun playgrounds. I leave it in our car so that whenever we are looking for a fun, new playground to go to on the weekends as a family, we can pick-it up and just choose where we want to go...Marin, San Francisco, East Bay, South Bay. It's great! The descriptions of the parks are right on. We've never been let down. The must-go-see parks are truly a lot of fun for my 3.5 and 1.5 year old kids. I use the book too as a quick resource guide when I'm trying to kill time in the city. There's so many parks in San Franciso, it's fun for my kids to try out all of the parks. You can't go wrong with owning this book. Every mother with young kids in the Bay Area should own this book.

As a huge fan and frequenter of San Francisco and it's playgrounds, libraries, museums and other kid-friendly places, I was really excited to get this book, and it does have some good information. However, after looking through it more carefully, I found that not only does it not list many of San Francisco's playgrounds and parks ([...]'s Survey of San Francisco Playgrounds is much better, though it's also outdated#, but some playgrounds that have been remodeled in the last few years are described as their pre-remodeled structures, e.g. Junipero Serra playground, JP Murphy playground, Alta Plaza, and Upper Noe Playground & Rec Center. I would understand if they had been remodeled within the past year, after the book was published, but it's been 3 or 4 years for some of those, and the book didn't even mention that they were going to be remodeled. Also, many playgrounds listed in the Index are not in the book! I feel like they tried, but could have been so much more comprehensive, and I don't think they even vistited some of the sites when they made this 3rd edition. Also, the website in the book, [...], is incorrect. It's [...] (Parents of Multiples, not Mothers of Twins Club). I'm disappointed, but it's still an ok resource.

I found this guide to be very useful! I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life and it still introduced me to lots of places I had never heard about.