Unsolicited Endorsement: Pokémon parks

by Brian Clarey

We took no fewer than four separate Pokémon hunts this weekend, based on rumors of spawning grounds and sightings of rare creatures documented on social media.

We started at Bicentennial Garden, the lovely floral enclave near the center of the Greensboro, where with perhaps 100 other folk — families, young couples, groups of teens and single nerdlings — we gathered magikarps along the creek bed as easily as picking peaches from a bin. We stocked up on psyducks and slowpokes there, too. To our knowledge — which includes the collective wisdom of an entire squad of teenage boys — Bicentennial is the best Pokémon park in Greensboro.

The stops in the game are laid upon a map created for a previous game called Ingress: a crowdsourced tour of churches, public art and other landmarks, and public parks are notoriously fertile territory.

We’d hit the stops on Elm Street and caught a bunch at Center City Park, making the cemetery run along the road that borders Green Hill — nothing brings people to a graveyard, apparently, like a concentration of Pokémon stops. The arboretum is solid as well.

On Sunday we nabbed seels and golducks near country park, and took advantage of a machop spawn we had heard about. Over at Battleground Park, we saw and captured our first onnix. Later that day we hiked a short stretch of greenway and then went back to Bicentennial Garden to fill our bags.

We’re hoping to hit Tanglewood Park, where rumor has it that there are charmanders nesting. That same grapevine says that Tanglewood is in the process of removing all of its pokéstops. That would be a shame — Pokémon Go is the best thing that’s happened to parks since Teddy Roosevelt.