On Friday, our daughter's preschool went to Knott's Berry Farm, a theme park in Orange County. The school pr0vided a free ticket for each student and for one parent, but my wife arranged to get the day off from work, and we made it a family excursion, taking our ten month-old son as well. We were able to buy one adult ticket at a discount group rate through the preschool.The highlight of the park for the toddler set is Camp Snoopy, which has ten or fifteen rides and attractions for younger children. Knott's Berry Farm is now owned by Cedar Fair, an Ohio-based amusement park company, but when the park was still owned by the Knott family, they signed an agreement with Charles Schultz allowing them to create a children's area using the Peanuts characters.
Actually, our three year-old daughter doesn't know Snoopy, Charlie Brown, or the rest of the characters (the way she knows the Disney princesses, Elmo, or the Wiggles). But somehow she wasn't scared of the giant Snoopy costumed character, in the way she was scared of getting close to Mickey Mouse when we visited Disneyland last March and in the fall of last year.
The Camp Snoopy area has a lot of fun things for preschoolers, with an indoor playhouse, huge bounce house, and lots of rides that were a little fast but not too scary. It reminded me of Adventure City, a smaller theme park just for kids a little further down Beach Boulevard, in being less sophisticated in its rides, but still a lot of fun for younger kids.
The real advantage Knott's has over Disneyland is the lack of crowds. Most of the day, we could go on the rides in Camp Snoopy with wait times of two minutes or less. And the rest of the park seemed very uncrowded as well. Knott's admission prices are 2/3 of Disneyland's prices, and they regularly offer discounts to local residents.
