Cabin John Regional Park in Rockville, Maryland is one of the larger playgrounds in Montgomery County, with a sprawling play area and a variety of equipment.
Features:
- swings
- bucket swings
- slides
- climbing structures
- toddler play areas
- musical play equipment
Amenities:
- bathrooms
- sheltered picnic areas
Nearby:
- miniature train
- dog park
- ice rink
- athletic fields and complex
- walking trails
- Locust Grove Nature Center
Pros:
- The shade and tree filled landscape make this playground inviting.
- The size of the play area is very large.
- The good location not far from the intersection of I-495 and I-270, plus all the nearby fun things, like the miniature train, make this a well used park.
- Plenty of good picnic spots are available.
Cons:
- Watch out for your toddlers as there’s no boundaries to the large play area. It’s easy to lose a small child here.
- Thanks to all the snacking, the central picnic area is often full of yellowjackets.
- There’s no central design to the playground.
- Despite the scale of a playground for older children, most of the equipment is intended for younger children.
Mushroom’s Review
I wish it was like the pictures I saw on the computer. I think, it was a lot better back then. Apparently they shut it all down. This park is for little kids. There is a big slide that was okay.
BalletBoy’s Review
I liked the park. It wasn’t as good as I expected though. I thought it would be wooden. I liked the slides there. I only did them one time though.
Farrar’s Review
We had not visited this playground in years, so we took a trip up to reevaluate it. After all, I hear constantly from parents that this is a great playground. It has even won polls in local magazines. Unfortunately, we all found it really disappointing. The landscape of the playground is excellent. The trees, the hilly atmosphere and the size of the area make you initially excited. However, the equipment is just so dull overall, that there’s not really a reason to make this a destination play spot. If you live nearby, then I’m sure it’s a fine place to play, but for a space with so much potential, it’s almost painful to see how they’ve wasted it. From a design point of view, there’s absolutely no unifying feature. Equipment from multiple corporations, bought and installed at various times is scattered around with no real sense of flow. Mushroom and BalletBoy wandered from one piece to the next, but they never got inspired by the space, which is unusual for them. From the images, you can probably get the sense that these pieces of equipment are relatively widely spaced, which might have worked, but didn’t seem to do much for my kids.
To make matters worse (and explain Mushroom and BalletBoy’s reviews!), if you click on the website for the playground you’ll find three small images at the top of the page. The first one shows toddler equipment that’s still at the playground. The second two show the old Cabin John playground, a large wooden structure that made use of the hilly landscape to give the slides some extra height and seemed to have tire features and long passages from one part of the playground to the next. That’s all gone. Only a small wooden gazebo-like space is left of the old playground. Having seen those pictures as I grabbed directions before we left, the kids spent most of their time sulking that the playground was such a letdown. Where were the old wooden parts, they wanted to know. Me too, kids.
Worst of all, this makes me depressed about the outlook for the Wheaton Regional redesign, slated to open next month (if it’s still on time). Clearly Montgomery County can show at least some creative thinking with a playground like South Germantown Regional Park’s, but will the Wheaton redesign be decent like that or as half-baked as Cabin John? It looks like there will be some excellent big slides, but will there be anything else?
The Playground Review 