Omaha, Nebraska

We road tripped to Omaha, last June right after school was out. It was THE perfect trip! We wanted a destination we could drive to, that wasn’t too far! Our youngest was 1 1/2 still and we weren’t up for a long drive. We’ve learned quickly when we cater our trips to the kids interests, the trip goes much more smoothly. I literally googled the best zoo in the US, and Omaha Zoo came up! The more I researched, the more kid friendly Omaha stood out.

I’ve always had a bucket list item to travel to every MLB stadium with my future kids. Now that I have three boys, I can’t wait to tackle this, but right now it seems like we ticking off every zoo in the US first, and 'I’m not mad about it.

I could write a whole post on Omaha Zoo itself. We spent 5 days total in Omaha and probably could have spent 2 days at the zoo. I do have a hack for visiting this zoo and others too!

This trip was very memorable because about a week before we left, my youngest got sick with a stomach bug. At the time we thought it was a combination of jumping on the trampoline and eating something bad, but the night before we left for Omaha, my husband too got sick. I don’t know about everyone else with small kids, but we also like to also visit Urgent Care facilities in every state. Someone is always sick on vacation. So, we barely got any sleep, and were going to wake up about 4am to get a head start on the road. Needless to say, we let my husband sleep a little longer, and carried on. Luckliy our entire car was packed and ready to go for a 4am start, so I just had to buckle up the kids. We made it an hour into the trip and had to pull over on the highway so my husband could do his thing. Ask my kids about Omaha and this will be the first story they tell you!

We perservered, I drove the entire way, stopped with 3 kids for potty breaks, breakfast, lunch, hotel check in, unpacking, and my husband was down! He slept it off as soon as we checked in. So, not the best start. I was pretty scared to take the kids out in a new city by myself, but I am so glad it was Omaha. We headed to Leahy Mall, which was a huge open area with the COOLEST kids parks. There were a ton of food trucks, and we got snow cones. One of the coolest parts of Omaha was you could walk all over and run into another sick kids park, or random slide. We played until my kids were starving and we discovered Picklemans! My kids new favorite restaurant, and thank god for it. It had something on the menu everyone would eat. Then we headed back to the hotel to chill and sleep.

The next day was our zoo day! The Omaha zoo is a part of the reciprocal zoo list. Our local zoo, Brookfield is not apart of it. So, we purchased a membership to the petting zoo near us in Wheaton, Cosley Zoo. The Membership was $75/year but also gave us half off admission at the Omaha Zoo, of course free admission to Cosley as well as Milwaukee Zoo. So, we knew we’d get our money worth!

We made our way through the entire zoo, and ended at the Childnen’s Family Adventure Trails. You could go to the North Entrance only and just spend some time there. It was so much fun, with a huge splash pad. Our kids loved it. Bathrooms were nearby to change too, and a restaurant/spot for lunch.

We loved the Leid jungle, a huge interactive kids play area. We had to pry our kids out. If we were to do it again, we would do two days just for the play areas.

For dinner we went to Spaghetti Works and it was the best restaurant with kids! We sat outside, our kids actually ate their kids meal. A local balloon lady came through to make balloons for kids. I can’t remember if it was tips appreciated or if they were priced, but our kids got ballons for under $10 and were entertained while they waited for their food, which is well worth $10.

Day 3: We started at the Safara Drive Through Zoo. If we did this trip again, we would probably skip. Our kids loved that we could drive but wasn’t as exciting as we thought. They did have a lot of trails you could walk through, but were not stroller friendly, and our kids were not in the mood. We made it back in time for lunch, so a great morning activity.

We then took Dad to explore Leahy Mall and enjoy all the parks and slides. We hit up Hollywood Candy. It was a huge candy store with candy and toys from all the decades. Our kids picked out some goodies and we walked to Lewis & Clark Landing. This park was HUGE with such fun water features kids could play in. It was a far walk and it was hot that day. You could have easily drive, and that would have been the better choice. We walked around the Old Market and got dinner at Picklemans again, because our kids were begging to go back.

Day 4: We headed to FunPlex water park. We got lucky and they had an early morning event. So we got some extra time there. There was a water park on one side with baby area, a huge splash area with slides that was perfect for our kids’ ages, a huge wave pool and lazy river. On the other side of the waterpark were a ton of rides and go karts. We hopped back and forth between both and our kids had a blast. Towards the end, we made it to the splash pad area, which was conveinenetly located by an adult only pool with a swim up bar. I swam up, got us some lovely beverages to watch our kids play in the splash pad area. This day was a 10/10 and everyone was tired!

We missed out on a lot of the breweries becasue my husband wasn’t 100% better yet, so we finally decided to try one for dinner. We headed towards Up Stream Brewing. They didn’t have any food, and our kids needed to eat, so we started to explore the area. This was the area where the College Baseball World series takes place, and we didnt know it but it started the next day! We started to see some families and teams checking into the hotel and it was fun to see the comraderie between the players. We ate at Blatt Beer + Table. The food was great and we had a fun view of the Charles Schawb Field. This was fun for our baseball bros to see, and we’d love to take them back when they’re older. We wanted to get back to the brewery but a storm was coming through and we walked, so we headed back to the hotel.

We packed up and left the next day, but not before stopping back to our favorite coffee shop. We also headed back to the World Series baseball area to grab some souveniors and head home. We had to make it back for our boys’ tball game that night!