Vacation Idea #5 ~ Great Wolf Lodge

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Every Monday from January to September

- Vacation Idea #5 -

Great Wolf Lodge

A fun newish water park resort that is popping up in states all across America is the Great Wolf Lodge. At the time of this posting they can be found in North Carolina, Washington, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Virginia, and there is one on Canada.  

We stayed in the 'kids cabin' room which was adorable and a lot of fun for the kids. It had a small built in "room" without a door that separated the children's area from the main room. The hotels offers a variety of rooms some themed some plain. Rates vary quite a bit from room to room and on different days of the week. Water park passes come with the hotel rooms. 

The water park portion of the hotel had features for all ages from wading pools suitable for small children all the way to water slides that were exciting enough for adults. For an overnight stay we had enough to do, any longer and we might have been a bit bored. Staying together was a bit of a challenge in the water park because there are a lot of people. We found that we had to set some rules about where to meet, what to do if you end up at the bottom of a slide before everyone else, and not leaving an area to go to another without letting someone know. The lodge supplied a full range of life vests from infant to adult.

One of the best features of this hotel was a game called magiquest. For an additional price you can buy little magic wands that, when waved, animates certain things throughout the hotel. For instance if you look at the very last photo there is a birdhouse on the wall of the upper level, just below the antler chandelier in the photo. When a wand was waved at that it played a sound and a little bird popped out. Things like that were hidden through out, and it was surprising how many there were. For our first trip we just bought the wand without a topper as they have generic toppers to go with the wands. You get to keep the wands and on our next trip we will probably buy the fun toppers. Magiquest is not cheap, but it added a lot to the trip. We almost could have skipped the water park and just played magiquest, almost. (note: Parents who do not like Harry Potter might not like magiquest and may want to look into it a bit before you go. I personally found it more fairy taleish than anything else.) 

Other features: Bedtime story for young children was fun. The last photo shows the story time area. There were also features such as a guided tour, arcade, scoops salon and others which we did not visit if we had stayed more than one night they might have been fun to check out. 

Over all there was a wonderful family atmosphere at the Great Wolf Lodge, lots of kids running around having fun, and lots of parents smiling.

The photos below are from the Great Wolf Lodge in Washington.

View from the parking lot.

Stairs up to the slides. They were huge. Do you see the people? Look closely!

My hubby smiling

Fun, hard, obstacle course.

See the bucket on top? That thing dumps a whole lot of water every few minutes. 

This is where the story time was. The trees on either side had mechanical eyes that would open and the trees "talked". Very cute.