Our winter vacation

The school district around here decided to give us a 5 day break in the middle of January. Yeah that is great when you are in Austrailia and it is warm, but there isn't much to do in the middle of January. However, Jason and I wanted to do something fun for the kids so we finally came up with a fun "vacation" in the middle of winter. We took them to a local hotel place called the Great Wolf Lodge.

This place is a brand new lodge just about 30 minutes away. The rooms have different themes such as kid camp, or log cabin. We chose the room called the wolf den. The room comes with a separate area for the kids to sleep in called, appropriately, the wolf den. There are bunkbeds and the kids have their own TV. The kids were thrilled with the idea of having free reign of the TV. It was quite the setup.



Another great activity provided by the lodge is the Magi quest game. The kids get a wand and they basically play an interactive live video game. There are clues throughout the 8 floors that the kids wave their wand at (it could be a picture, a stuffed animal, a book, a treasure chest, or a variety of other things) and earn runes to help them on their way to becoming full fledged Magi. We were trecking up and down those 8 floors for about three hours and never even made it to a junior magi. The guys told us it would take about 8 hours to finish the quest. We got too pooped to finish, much to Breanna's dismay. I guess if we ever get bored we can go back to the hotel and finish our game.

And finally, the very best thing about the Great Wolf Lodge is the four story indoor water park. There were 8 huge slides of varying degrees of scariness. The scariest, was the tornado. We lovingly referred to it as the toilet. You had to have at least three people to go on it and since our kids refused because it was "just way too terrifying", we never got the chance to experience going down the toilet. Jason and Breanna however, did go down the little toilet. Josh refused that one too (apparently, he "has a fear of spinning around in circles", yeah, whatever). But by the time we convinced Breanna to go on the little toilet with me, the line was way too long. So I wasn't able to go down any toilet. I have always wanted that nice feeling of being flushed down the tube. Oh well maybe some other time.

We did convince Joshua (the more nervous of the two kids, surprise, surprise) to go on a huge slide with a big raft. All four of us could ride the one raft. We pointed out all the little kids going on it and Joshua finally conceded and went with us. Too bad he closed his eyes the entire time and missed the great ride. I'm pretty darn sure Joshua gets his timidness from ME. Oh I feel so sorry for that kid, he is just too much like his mother. I can guarantee Iwouldn't have gone on any of the slides when I was his age. I had a huge fear of the water then (really I still don't like water much). Joshua did go down all the other slides though, which I was proud of him for. By the way, I don't count the toddler slide (in the picture) as one of the big slides that Joshua went on.

The kids favorite part of the park was the wave pool. It was quite the wild fun. I don't have to explain it really, it was just a huge pool with big waves. Need I say more?

Really this place was so kid friendly. Besides the slides and the wave pool, this water park had a four story tree house that was spraying water everywhere, a toddler area with all kinds of things to climb, hot tubs, a lazy river, and best of all warm towels waiting for you when you are done.