Great Wolf

We took our little ones to Great Wolf Lodge this past weekend, a Christmas present to us from my parents. It was our first non-visiting-a-relative vacation as a family since, oh, I guess that Paris trip two years ago, but that one was sans children. So it was our first non-visiting-a-relative vacation ever. Even if it was only for two days and a night.

You know what? I liked it.

Yeah, my body is aching and my brain is desperately jonesing for 72-96 hours of complete sensory deprivation. Great Wolf is basically an indoor water park, but an indoor water park with arcades, pizzerias, ice cream parlors, gift shops, spas, flourescent bowling alleys, Harry Potter-esque human-sized interactive attractions, and probably a half-dozen other things we didn’t see in the whirlwind 28 hours we were there.

My back is killing me from hefting my little ones about, my calves are on fire from climbing dozens of water slide stairs, my neck is achy from an unfamiliar bed, my hands are all dried out from chlorine, and I’m about ten pounds heavier thanks to beer and pizza. Despite that, though, I enjoyed myself. And the wife enjoyed herself and the little ones were absolutely ecstatic with unbridled joy and excitement. A great way to combat the polar vortex sub-Arctic February blues.

We hit all the pools, all the water slides, all the tubing and rafting tunnels. The wife and I drank cool Sam Adamses overlooking our girls in the wave pool, the big hit for five-year-old Patch. I pseudo-white-water-rafted with my nine-year-old, Little One. We got drenched from random falling buckets of water. We did all this for four hours Sunday and four hours yesterday, and those eight hours literally swam by with the speed of a mid-Pacific tsunami.

Patch was wiped out. After a long hot shower with mom and her sister, she flopped onto the bed and into a comatose sleep. Pizza barely roused her, and only for a few bites. I stayed in the room with her while the wife took Little One to “story time” in the main lodge, where, along with a hundred other pre-tweens, they listened to a bedtime story which basically hopped them all up into overdrive. Still, when the two of them returned at 8:30, both hit the bed and were out in minutes, leaving me all by my lonesome.

I read my math book and drank a beer. My version, nowadays, of a party.

Anyway, here are some photos of the girls documenting our first family vacation, half-a-decade late (at least). Next year: Disney! (Note: need to bring more books and smuggle in more beer ...)