Learn from my fail: Rock City is great for kids, but…

I’ve been going to Rock City since I can remember (sometime in the 70’s.) This previous weekend we decided to take the kids there and ran into their Rocktoberfest celebration, which was unplanned on our part and actually quite awesome.

We danced in the Pavilion, caught about three seconds of a bird of prey exhibit, and basically wore the 4yo and 2yo down with walks through the place seeing everything we could.

Now, I’m going to get to my fails here as a parent.

Don’t let toddler ride shoulders on bridge

The first fail we had was the swinging bridge. I had baby on my shoulders, she was having a blast, I was following my 4yo who was saying this was very creepy – I think she was having scared fun walking across said bridge.

We didn’t factor in drinking adults jumping on the bridge in front of us. As such we were swaying hard and I ended up crouched because I couldn’t transition the 2yo off my shoulders in what I felt was a safe fashion.

Don’t put baby in back carrier in cave

Having learned from that mistake we moved on to an area called the Fat Man Squeeze. We’d put Aerin (the 2yo,) on my back in a Tula baby carrier facing forward and went into the Fat Man Squeeze, which is walking between two giant stone walls that progressively get tighter and tighter.

I called to Kim that I wasn’t going to make it and she told me to keep going, not realizing that she was twisting to make it and I have a baby hunchback that was going to be a problem.

What the real problem was was I got to the point my shoulders were touching/wedged and I could not rotate in the slightest without dragging a baby along a stone wall. I went to back up and there were about 130 people behind us. There was no going back. We were wedged between a mass of sobriety suspect tourists and a rock.

The lady behind me lifted Aerin out of the backpack and I was able to limbo with her in my arms through the rest of Fat Man Squeeze without so much as a scratch.

Don’t let anyone below 4 in their gnome store

After the walk we went to a couple of their stores where they put all the breakable stuff at 2 feet above floor level. Yeah. Everyone knows your baby just broke that.

Overall trip

Rock City was great, just don’t do what I did.