Horizontal Ladder Monkey Bars

As you may already know (if you have been reading this this blog regularly), I am a big SpongeBob SquarePants fan. Well, on their Lost Episode, Patchy the Pirate (not animated) left his suburban Encino, California home with his treasure map to find the tape of the lost episode (that he had lost). The map directed Patchy to a playground where, for some absurd reason, he felt compelled to undergo all of the kiddie rides there before he started digging. Among the rides was one of those types of horizontal ladder monkey bars that I used to play on as a kid. Being an adult, Patchy naturally looked totally silly walking, instead of swinging, under the bars, still painstakingly clutching on to each rung as he crossed it.

At my old elementary school, we had a couple of these types of monkey bars, and it was something of a competition among some of us to see who could swing across the bars to the other side while skipping as many rungs as possible. Just about anybody, with some practice, could skip a rung while passing across, but only a few of us (me included) could make it skipping two. But on a couple of occasions, I observed classmates making the "trip" skipping three rungs!. But I never got that far.

Nowadays, like Patchy, whenever I come across one of those horizontal ladder monkey bars (which is becoming increasingly rarer), I usually find them way too low for me to swing from. But once, a few years ago, my family and I were approaching Atlanta from the north. A few miles north of that great city, we stopped off at a state park with a well-equipped playground. With horizontal ladder monkey bars. And they were very high up off the ground! But I found, as I tried to cross one, that my arms and shoulders had become so much weaker over the years that I could barely just stay put hanging from a rung, much less cross the "ladder"! But I realized then that it would be a fun thing to get myself into better shape by practicing crossing them after I returned to Gainesville. Only I never did find any that were high enough off the ground for me to swing from. And besides, the trend in playgrounds nowadays seems to be equipment made from plastic or wood. Apparently some do-gooder somewhere decided that the metal equipment posed a greater danger to children. But having seen Patchy cross the bars on that SpongeBob episode for what seemed like the umpteen-millionth time, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be fun to check out if there are still any of those around town. And if there are, this may be the start of a new training program to complement my running (I don't care for weight-training: but that's another story). Who knows: I may just get to be a three-rung skipper after all!