Splashy Monday

HIT THE GROUND RUNNING: This morning we were up and at 'em before 7 a.m. That's not out of the ordinary (unfortunately), but what was different is that we were in the car heading southbound on I-5 by 7:30 a.m.

Our destination was Grand Mound, Washington, location of the Great Wolf Lodge.

A month or so ago, I scored day passes for the four of us for just $15 per person. That's a great opportunity as GWL doesn't sell day passes - you have to be a guest there to access the water park and it is $pendy. (Their bargain rate for a room right now is $199 a night.) We bought our passes through a Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Clark County fund raiser. I learned about it from one of the many discounts/coupons Web sites I follow.

We arrived at GWL and all its faux forestry/boulder glory at 9:04. It took two minutes to redeem our passes and we made a beeline for the waterpark.We spent four action-packed hours there. There was a little kids' area (pictured above) that was a little tame for CJ and Annabelle. There was a great wave pool (with warmish water, mercifully) that we had a lot of fun in. (Those waves got pretty wild - at one point a series of four or five of 'em knocked me down and kept me down!) CJ and Annabelle bobbed about happily though. (The blurry photo below is of them in the wave pool when it was between its two wave cycles. One cycle was waves in a straight line coming from the deep end. The other cycle was more on the diagonal, with bigger, more unpredictable swells.)
On the edge of the wave pool was a raining mushroom. CJ was drawn to it - no doubt the mushrooms reminded him of his Mario games.
It's funny, for a kid who doesn't like swimming much, CJ was a waterpark maniac! (He was that way during our trip to Orlando, too.) He wanted to go on the biggest, scariest, fastest attractions over and over and over and took more than a couple of snootfuls of water in the process. He declares "the crazy slide" (the Howlin' Tornado, which Annabelle wasn't quite tall enough to ride) his favorite.
Annabelle says River Canyon Run was her favorite. Here's a clip of the action...

The tubes of the slides are largely outside the building - which makes them bright when you're in them, which I appreciated. And now that we've been there, we know what that huge funnel shaped structure is on the lodge's side. It's the part of the Howlin' Tornado ride where you "whoosh back and forth and back and forth" after dropping off a steep ledge, per CJ's description.

There were a couple of smaller (non raft riding) slides inside the park which we did a few runs on. There was also a separate activity pool with multiple basketball hoops. We spent just a few minutes there. At the other end of that pool was a line of lily pads the kids could traverse.
We needed to hit the road by 1 and wanted to make the most of the pool time, so we didn't spend much time checking out the rest of the lodge. We did, however, HAVE to check out its arcade. It had lots of really big, really new, really EXPEN$IVE games (many were 4 tokens, or quarters, per play).

The kids did play air hockey and one driving game. But, frankly, the game that caught my attention was this one!!! Inspired by today's trip, CJ reports that he's going to have a hotel when he's an adult. "And when I have a hotel, I won't deny my guests' requests - even the most ridiculous requests."

We did a couple of educational things in the car today (I swear!), including trying to memorize everyone's new phone numbers. We used pictures and talked about patterns in the numbers to help burn them into the brain.

And we did make it home in plenty of time for Annabelle to attend her beloved ballet class at 3:30 (which is why we made such an early start this a.m.).

Tomorrow we'll be back to the old grind.