Focus on the Family Welcome Center

About

The three-story slide is what children come for, and it really is three stories, dropping from the top of the building to the lower level with a height requirement that rules out the smallest. What surrounds it is stranger and better than the slide alone. The lower floor is built as a walk-through world: a puppet theater, a stage where children invent a play for whoever is sitting in the seats, a wardrobe that opens into Narnia, a corridor with an airplane in it, a room of oversized building blocks, and scavenger-hunt checklists to work through. The under-fours have a room of their own, which more than one parent picks out as the reason a visit worked with a toddler in tow.

Admission is free, and that changes how families use it. Reviewers describe two and three hours here without spending anything, and the soda shop off the play floor — ice cream, pretzels, personal pizzas, hot dogs, milkshakes — gets called cheap rather than captive-audience priced, which is not the usual complaint about food inside an attraction. One family with children spanning four to thirteen reports all of them finding something, which is rare anywhere. Come knowing what the building is. This is the visitor center of a Christian ministry, the bookstore is the room you walk through to reach the play floor, and much of what is downstairs is built around the radio dramas the organization is known for.