tinkle of tiny feet

This picture was taken last September, but it illustrates the point well. It's taken at the Diana memorial playground in London. There are nine metal plates, each of which chimes a different tone when jumped upon.

We thought it would be cool to have something like this embedded in our garden, maybe like a musical stepping-stones path to the house or something. So I did some digging, and I made some calls around Europe, and I ended up on the phone with the company that created the Diana playground.

Turns out that this piece of gear is surprisingly complicated, it is sunk 30 inches into the ground to accomodate its mechanism, it's strong enough to drive a truck over, and at 10,000 pounds stirling, it's really priced a little beyond our needs.

Too bad. I guess this also rules out our other Diana-park fantasy item:

Really with a galleon like this in our yard, we'd be the talk of Montcaret, I bet. Kepler would certainly have no shortage of kids to play with. Oh, well. Maybe we can find ourselves an affordable giant metal ant anyway.