Timeless Thoughts: Hide and Seek playground

Timeless Thoughts

Timeless Thoughts is a monthly linkup hosted by Georgie and Tara, where bloggers write about something from their past – it could be an item, a place, an event – anything that evokes a trip down memory lane. Timeless Thoughts is held on the first Saturday of the month, and runs for two weeks.

When I was in kindergarten, there was a giant playground in the local shopping centre that cost some money to get in (probably a lot of money), but was very popular with the kids at my school. It was called Hide and Seek, and it was the place to have your birthday. You were the cool kid if your birthday was this month and your birthday party was going to be there.

Since I was born in May and much younger than my peers, my birthday was always after everyone else’s, thus I was one of the last to have their birthday at Hide and Seek. The excitement didn’t die though. Everyone wanted to go to the playground, year after year.

Hide and Seek was quite dark themed, multi-level – which, for a kid, meant that there were five levels of crawling and standing to be thoroughly enjoyed – had a ball pit, a giant slide, and gave a real sense of adventure. No parents allowed. They wouldn’t even fit in there. When you said goodbye to your parents, you could be in that adventure playground for well over an hour.

Actually, you’d avoid the giant slide, too, because usually your parents were waiting at the bottom of it. If I remember correctly, it was the only way out, and went from somewhere at the top of the playground, all the way to the bottom, and the end, exiting the main ‘body’ of the playground. The ‘body’ was just a giant walled-in area, so you can think of it as just being building-shaped with nothing sticking out or anything.

I wish I had photos of this place.

I wish this place still existed.

I wish – even though I have nightmares of my friend eating chicken nuggets dipped into his Coca Cola at my birthday party at Hide and Seek – that this playground existed somewhere, in some form, and wasn’t just closed and demolished and replaced with a food court and boring offices, and twenty years later, an electronics store and a gym, but – no, it’s gone.

And it was in the era of no-internet that Hide and Seek existed, so there’s nothing on the internet about it. There is some place in Canada called Hide N Seek, and even my memory does not serve me well as to remember whether the ‘and’ was stylised… but what I remember of Hide and Seek is a little corner of my head that makes me smile with glee.

As I have grown up, I have not seen a playground that can even be likened to Hide and Seek. Its dark sort of atmosphere gave a childish sense of trepidation and fun, something that lacks in today’s playgrounds, which are normally extremely bright, colourful and well lit. Nothing is quite the same. I feel like it would taint my memory to even include a photo of any other playground in this post.

So I’m left to think… Hide and Seek is hiding, forever.

If you’d like to join Timeless Thoughts this month, you can add your link below.

 Loading InLinkz ...

Comments on this post

Oh, you made me remember some of my birthday parties! Maybe I should write my TT on the same theme :P I did the McDonalds party when I was 5 and all the kids threw pickles on the wall, floor and anywhere else you can think of. As a kid that always loved pickles I was so confused why they were doing it.
I also had a bowling alley party that included these fizzy lollipops that cut up your tongue but you still ate them anyway! Plus I got to take home a bowling pin that year. For some reason that was very special :D

Hide and Seek sounds really awesome! Its playground cred reminds me of Chuck E. Cheese’s, THE place to have a birthday party when I was a kid.

The playground sounds awesome, though. Sometimes, I wish I could still go and play on playgrounds and jungle gyms, but…I can’t fit. They need, like, an adult playground. ^^;

Thanks for sharing this memory! Hide and Seek sounds like several of the indoor playgrounds I’ve been to as a kid (and as an adult as a chaperone) and those places are fun as heck! It’s great that the place gave you so many good memories, but it is a shame they closed it down and put boring stuff in its place :( All good things tend to come to an end, unfortunately. Today’s playground definitely aren’t as cool and awesome as the playgrounds we had as a kid!

Hide and seek is an awesome childhood classic game. It’s interesting to see how creative kids can be. Though, kids can fit into pretty much anything XD

I can’t think of many places today that can harness hide and seek like how it was back then. An example would be fast food restaurants tearing down the playgrounds. At least there are still houses that can host hide and seek! Maybe laser tag can be a kid’s new hide and seek playground ;)

That would have been so much fun! From the way that you described it, I can just imagine being there. :D

I have bad and good memories on the play ground and hide and seek. I’m a very temperamental girl and have been, so if I felt like everyone was ganging up on me, I’d cry. Especially if we played hide and seek. It was my least favorite game, but still, I did have some happy memories in it. I don’t remember much of my childhood, but there was something special about being a child, wasn’t there?

When I read this post, it really reminded me of my childhood adventures and how the world seems so much bigger. As a child, I enjoyed feeding swans, playing in the park and running around mazes. They all seems so big and exciting when I just a tiny person. They are still great too, but doesn’t seem as big anymore.

Hello Georgie! Your timeless thoughts post really reminded me of the playground that I used to play at with the neighborhood kids at the park across from the house. I remember that we had two slides there, one very long and curvy slide that only had chains as ladders (quite dangerous for kids to climb up if you ask me), a bunch of swings, and a small obstacle course that was built with wood and metal. But over the years, that area of that park changed, up until now where they just got rid of the playground altogether to put some meeting hall building over there. I guess that means that because all the children who played there all grew up, the park must move on too.