If you want to explore a really awesome park and make a day or an afternoon of it, Fish Lake Regional Park is a great place to visit.

This park really is something. Being a regional park, it's really quite huge for the metro area. There are many miles of walking/hiking trails, and they're stroller-friendly. The trails here also connect to a broader Twin Cities trail system, as the Medicine Lake Regional Trail connects this park to the equally gorgeous Clifton E. French Regional Park. We like to bike these trails, and the girls could easily spend all day here. I first used to frequent this park when the kids were tiny. I would come this way to pick up our weekly box of fresh produce from our CSA. Then, I would take the box of fruits and bring it along to the beach here. The girls would choose a fruit and we'd play at the beach and taste our deliciously fresh, organic fruit by the lake. It was glorious!

But this park has so much more to offer than summertime activities. In the winter, you'll find opportunities for ice fishing on the lake, and plentiful turf trails for snowshoeing and hiking. Our family loves to snowshoe, so this being a snowshoe-friendly park is definitely a bonus for us. This park is also dog-friendly and features a fully-fenced dog off-leash area.

The season this park is most famous for, of course, is the fall. Fish Lake is a notoriously gorgeous park to visit when the leaves change. So, if you're heading to Minnesota in the fall (you really should, as it's gorgeous here in the fall) this is a great park to list as a must-see. Some parks, of course, have better fall colors than others, and this is definitely one of them. Here, you'll find the maples on fire with oranges, yellows, and reds, and all in a serene wooded scene. We visited Fish Lake in the fall, and the girls were delighted by seeing all the cattails blooming by the water. They found incredible joy in "fuzzing" the cattails, spinning, waving, and watching the delicate fuzz fly into the breeze.

We really adore this park. It has just about every amenity you can imagine...a gorgeous beach, miles of trails, lake activities in the summer, and woods as far as the eye can see. It also has tons of free parking, restrooms, picnic areas, and a rental pavilion. There is truly nothing lacking here.