I am whooped. The fam and I just got back from a place in Pennsylvania called Peddler’s Village. It’s a very toursity place where people go to buy lots of crap that they don’t really need. Fortunately we didn’t go for that reason. You see they also have a mini-amusement park for kids called Giggleberry Fair which consists of a merry-go-round, a playroom full of dress up clothes, musical instruments, puppets, etc… But the coup de gras at this place is “Giggleberry Mountain” which is a gigantic contraption made of nets, ropes, tubes, slides, and anything else a kid might want to climb. It goes up six stories!
BUT, the best thing about this whole place, the thing that makes me want to go back again and again: on the bottom two levels of Giggleberry Mountain are a series of air canons for firing little NERF-like balls, of which there are literally thousands scattered here, there and everywhere. On the lower level there are canons that fire large volumes of balls up into the air, and on the second level there are swivel cannons that you use to fire at opponents on the other side of the well. Or you can do what I did and fire down into the well… into the crowd.
The best part is shooting at those kids who have just walked in and don’t quite realize what the room is all about just yet. Then out of nowhere a little ball suddenly plunks them in the head. They look up like, “What the heck was that?” When they shrug their shoulders and look away, you blast them again. Seriously, how awesome is that? Where else in America can you go where it’s actually okay, and even encouraged, for you to shoot little kids in the head? Nowhere, that’s where!
And I just want to say that I think I earned the title of “Funnest Grownup on the Freakin’ Planet” tonight. Most parents were only shooting at their own kids. Well, my kid was off with her mother climbing nets. So I just started unloading on anyone who was at least six-years-old and within range. At first they’d be like, “Holy crap, was that an adult who just shot me?” But after the second or third direct hit, they smartened up and started returning fire. By the time we finally moseyed on out of this place, I had a good twenty kids all ganging up to blast me with cannons or, when that failed, flinging them like 
baseballs and cheering like Mardi Gras whenever they pegged me in the face. No kidding, almost every single kid in that well was ignoring every other person at every other cannon and focusing every bit of firepower on me. It was like being on American Gladiators except I was the Gladiator.
It… was… AWESOME!