Icential: the Wrap-around Ice Pack

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Our family is an active one – I like to take the boys on picnics, on hikes, to the beach, and other activities that sometimes require long car trips. We’re also fairly frugal so I often pack snacks for these trips or even entire meals.

My favorite picnic/snack hauler is a soft-sided cooler bag. It’s basically a large insulated bag that you can carry over your shoulder. I would put hard ice packs or sometimes zip top plastic bags full of ice cubes in it to keep the food and drinks cold.

icential lemonade

But then I met Icential, and I won’t be going back to that!

Icential Coolwraps are flexible sets of Gool+ Gel packs that you can wrap around your food or drinks, or attach together with Velcro to create larger cooling “blankets.”

We use the wraps most often to line the inside of our soft-sided cooler bag. But they are pretty handy for wrapping around your water bottle, or a bottle of white wine to keep chilled outside on the patio without a drippy mess.

The wraps come in pink or blue. We have both, which is fun, because I like to grab a pink one to wrap around my water bottle to keep it cold in the car.

A set of 2 Icential wraps is $19.95. You can order them from Amazon or directly from the company, which is based in Westlake Village! I wonder if they take walk-ins…

I received two free sets of Icential Cool Wraps to facilitate this feature.

Old Agoura Park – aka “The Horse Park”

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Our first excursion for the Summer Park Challenge was to Old Agoura Park, or “The Horse Park” as my family calls it. You will see that we have nicknames for every park, because when we moved here, the kids were 5 and 3 and could not quite identify with the parks’ proper names.

Old Agoura Park is located just east of Agoura Hills High School, and just north of the 101 freeway.

map to old agoura park

See that blank space to the east of the park? It’s not a mistake. That is part of the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and remains blessedly undeveloped. For now.

We have visited this park at many different times of the day and it has never been crowded. Plenty of parking, shade under the old oak trees, clean bathrooms, and different features for play. On this day, we were the only people in the play area:

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IMG_8914Plenty of shade for a picnic

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IMG_8919Standard issue bathroom house

IMG_8920“Hores are permitted only in designated areas.”

IMG_8922These out-of-water pier posts make for minutes of family fun.

IMG_8930If you build it, they will come.

IMG_8931Grand old oak roundabout

IMG_8933Track for people or horses around back of baseball field.

IMG_8934Horse trailer parking

IMG_8937Look out behind you…

IMG_8938…surprise!

IMG_8939The horse whisperer.