Bonfante Gardens

Much cuter than Disneyland. Much shorter lines. Most of the park was reasonably cool and shady even though it was 90 degrees on Saturday.  Unfortunately it has many fewer princesses and much less cool souvenir stuff to buy than Disney. I’m in love. Although, I think it’s definitely a place for women and children. None of the rides are scary, and it’s awful cutesy. Probably, the only one who reads this blog who will love the park is Meli (if you haven’t seen it, go, go now!).
                 
For those of you who haven’t bothered going to the website. www.bonfantegardens.com Bonfante gardens is a theme park with an agricultural theme. The main/ first attraction was the circus trees which are really a bunch of trees grafted together to make shapes and stuff.  Michael Bonfante made them himself, was the only one who knew how, and took the secret with him to his grave. This makes him a big jerk! And I don’t like him, I hope he’s spinning in his grave about the fact that paramount is running his park and selling their crappy souvenirs.
The kiddie ride part of the park is equally great.  Most of the rides are food themed: artichoke, strawberry, apple, banana, garlic, mushroom… and unlike every other theme park in existence that makes all of their rides shiny like a carousel horse, many of these rides were matte. And they had very much attention to detail.  Fine lines, shading. The artichokes even had the little pointy tip debossed and painted. It is also the first theme park that I’ve noticed artichokes being sold, granted they were deep fried, but still impossible to imagine being anywhere else. They had a pedal boat attraction, but of course it wasn’t a regular pedal boat, they were duck pedal boats. There were mallards, yellow ducks and swans and they looked so ridiculously adorable floating around the pond.

The strangest part about the park was the total laid back California attitude. You could pretty much do whatever and nazi teenagers wearing leiderhosen or old fashioned dresses weren’t around to stop you. They didn’t offer any instructions on how to drive the pedal boat ducks, they just slapped you in a life vest and sent you on your ducky way. The park was so uncrowded that most of the rides all you had to do was wait for the current cycle to finish and you’d get right on. They made sure you were safe and that your belts and bars were all correct, but somehow it seemed to be more laid back, and that made it run more smoothly. The only thing they were picky about was the 1 adult per strawberry car limit. Even though two of us could have more than safely been under the weight limit. And the words “please keep you hands and arms inside the car at all times” were heard so very little, it was refreshing.

Another great thing about the park is that there is a small mid-way section with games and over half of them involve you winning a prize just for paying your $3. This is how we almost ended up with a car full of stuffed toys, but last second managed to talk ourselves out of it. We did, however, come home with velvety plush roses with a bendy stem.

Conclusion: go, go, GO!