Recently, we took a few days off for some family time at Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg.  Under normal circumstances, we could not afford to take my brood there, since the rooms are close to 400$ a night.  BUT, thru a local homeschool group we got the deal of the century and could not pass it up.  The hotel contains a huge indoor water park like nothing you’ve ever seen.  Below you see the main structure, a complete ‘tree house’ of sorts with a bucket above that dumps 1000 gallons of water every five minutes.

Audrey

Just before the bucket dumps it gets full enough it starts ringing a bell (that green cylindrical thing to the right) using a water wheel.  This simply engineered design fascinated the kids, and it was fun having them try and figure out how it worked.  On the backside of the tree house are two water slides which were Malena’s favorite.  The place was rounded out with three larger, wilder slides, one could carry four people, and a Howling Tornado ride, which I can only liken to being flushed down the toilet.   These were Audrey’s favorite things.  Spencer loved and mastered the board wave pool, like you see people surfing on the cruise ship commercials.  He became quite skilled at his techniques and actually drew a crowd with his ’tricks’.  Cade hung out in the kiddie pool using the slides and interviewing lifeguards who could be potential brothers.  He finally decided on Steven, a lifeguard about 24 yrs old as his ‘brother’.  Each day we went out for a little while and saw some of Williamsburg, or a movie, or Presidents Park.  Each kid and grown up had fun!!

In the realm of ‘something for everyone’, Spencer played Magic Quest with a homeschool friend Dylan who he was happy to find was staying at the hotel during the same time!  While I originally felt like it was a rip off, it turned out to provide hours of exercise as these boys had to run all over the hotel looking for clues!