Waukesha Families Launch Playground Passport Odyssey As Summer Scavenger Hunt Season Begins

WAUKESHA — The city's Playground Passport program, which asks residents to visit all 14 designated playgrounds and answer a location-specific question at each stop in exchange for entry into a prize package, was designed by the Parks and Recreation Department to be completed at a family's own pace over roughly three months. At least one family has decided its own pace is one Saturday.

The passport runs through October 11 and covers a roster that stretches from Frame Park on the north end to the newly opened pocket playground at Backslide Way Park on the south side, with Minooka Park, Cutler Park, and ten others in between. Each stop has a laminated placard bolted near the equipment with a question tied to something specific to that location, a design Parks Director Michael Torres said was meant to make families "actually look around instead of just touching a sign and leaving."

Sarah Kowalski, 38, and her family of five did look around, at all 14 stops, between 8:12 a.m. and roughly 7 p.m. last Saturday, an attempt captured in real time by a Backslide Way neighbor with a lawn chair and, as it turned out, an unusually well-positioned sightline.

England, 70, of Backslide Way and known to his 420 subscribers as Nedventuresout, had his lawn chair and radar gun set up for an unrelated matter when the Kowalskis' minivan pulled up to the Backslide Way Park lot at 3:41 p.m., the ninth stop on their route. His resulting footage, an 11-minute video titled "PASSPORT FAMILY CLOCKED 6 MINUTES FLAT (Backslide Way, Stop 9 of 14)," shows the family of five exiting the vehicle, splitting into two groups at the placard, and departing within six minutes and twenty seconds.

"It's basically a road trip without leaving Waukesha."

— Sarah Kowalski, 38, Playground Passport participant

Kowalski said the family began plotting the route on a shared spreadsheet two weeks before attempting it, sequencing the 14 stops by drive time rather than the order printed in the passport booklet, and settled on an average of 18 minutes per location, including transit, after a practice run through the first four stops the previous weekend. "We had a version that was two minutes faster," Kowalski said, "but it put Frame Park in the middle of the day, and Frame Park has the good playground, and we didn't want the kids fighting us to stay there."

Eighteen Minutes, Not A Second More

The Kowalski children, ages 10, 8, and 6, were each assigned a role for the day: the 10-year-old read each placard's question aloud, the 8-year-old wrote the answer in the booklet, and the 6-year-old, according to Kowalski, "was in charge of morale, which is a real job, we just made it up." Her husband, Dave Kowalski, drove and kept a running countdown on his phone, calling out remaining minutes at each stop once the family passed the 12-minute mark.

"We weren't trying to skip the parks," Sarah Kowalski said. "We let them play. We just also had a schedule, and the schedule was the point, honestly, more than any individual playground was."

Torres, asked about the pace, said the department had not anticipated any family attempting all 14 stops in a single day but did not discourage it. "The passport doesn't have a minimum time requirement," he said. "If a family wants to do it in one day or one summer, that's their call. We're just glad they're at the parks." He added that the department has, since the Kowalskis' attempt began circulating, fielded three separate emails from other families asking whether a single-day completion is "allowed" or merely "possible."

"It's allowed," Torres said. "I'd call it ambitious."

England's Footage Was, By His Account, Incidental

England said he was not tracking the Playground Passport program specifically and had set up at Backslide Way Park that afternoon to observe an unrelated stretch of curb he suspects is being used for unauthorized long-term parking by a nearby apartment complex. He said he recognized the Kowalskis' minivan from a similar visit two Saturdays earlier, clocked their arrival and departure times out of "professional habit," and uploaded the footage "mostly because six minutes and twenty seconds seemed like a number worth documenting."

"I wasn't planning to make this a Playground Passport video," England said. "But once I had the timestamp, I had the timestamp." He said he has not decided whether to continue tracking passport traffic through Backslide Way Park for the remainder of the program, calling it "a maybe, depending on what else comes through."

The video had accumulated 388 views as of Monday, which England noted is "just under a view per subscriber, which for incidental content I'm calling a win."

Kowalski said the family has since submitted their completed passport to the Parks and Recreation office inside City Hall and is now waiting on the prize package, which Torres described as "a bundle, still being finalized, but it will include something water-related." She said the family has no plans to attempt any other city scavenger-hunt-style program at the same pace, calling Saturday's effort "a one-time thing, similar to how people do a marathon."

The Playground Passport program runs through October 11 at all 14 designated Waukesha playgrounds. Completed passports can be submitted at the Parks and Recreation office inside City Hall.