Day 6: Great Wolf Lodge

We ended our trip with 2 nights at the Great Wolf Lodge. The Great Wolf Lodge is a great hotel with a full waterpark INSIDE the hotel. They also have a lot of other activities for kids, including an activity room, nightly "storytime" and they have recently added an electronic "scavenger hunt".

We didn't tell the kids we were going here ahead of time, and we didn't want to stay here earlier in the week because we wanted them to pay attention in Williamsburg and Jamestown and knew that wouldn't happen if they were constantly thinking about going back to the waterpark.


All of the sleeping rooms are "themed" rooms. We stayed in the "Kid Cabin" room. This room has 2 bunk beds in a "cabin" within the room. Samantha and Michael stayed in the "cabin". They had their own TV. The room then had 1 Queen size bed and a pull out couch. The one thing we missed from this hotel is having a good place to put Emma. We put her next to the door to the balcony and while she was trying to go to sleep, we actually pulled the drape from the sliding door over and around her pack-n-play so the lights and sounds from the room would be blocked out.

We arrived here on Wednesday night for dinner. After checking in, we went to dinner at the restaurant. Then Mike, Samantha and Michael went to the water park. Our room rate included access to the water park for both our check-in as well as check-out days, and any days in between. The water park was open until 10pm, so they had a couple of good hours at the waterpark. I went back to the room and put Emma to bed, as she was quite tired from the disruptions in her schedule in the past week.


We all spent the following day - Thursday - at the water park. After breakfast we headed down there. There were so many neat things at this park. When you walk in, you see a huge "jungle gym" of paths and nets and ropes that looks like a cabin. On top of this is a HUGE bucket. This bucket fills up every 5 minutes and for the last minute rings a bell. When the bell starts ringing, children and adults alike run for the front of the bucket. Then, when the bucket fills up, it tips over - dumping 1000 gallons of water down on the people below. It was a popular attraction throughout the day.





Emma was a little hesitant at the beginning, but they had some nice attractions for her as well. We finally got her to walk into water about 6" deep to play with a water sluice that had gates that she could open and close. This entertained her for a long time. She also got great pleasure out of playing with the spouts of water that were around the park. She kept trying to "hit" the water as it came out, and a couple of times, tried to take water in her hands to fill up a hole that wasn't spouting water.

We also took Emma down a couple of "kiddie" slides. The first one was "too slow" for her so she wanted to go down the faster one. This one was pretty fast for someone her age, so Mike would put her in at the top and I would catch her at the bottom. She would come down the slide laughing and screaming the whole way and then splash into the water at the bottom as I caught her. She would then immediately say "Daddy Go", which meant she wanted to go again. We finally told her "enough"!



Samantha and Michael played on all of the other attractions. There were 2 water slides that were just for people and 3 that included innertubes. The innertube ones went both inside and outside the building. There was also a lazy river that wound its way around part of the park. Emma loved this as well and at one point rode around the loop FIVE TIMES on Mike's lap.

It was nice also that this was a safe place for the kids to choose what they wanted to do and we didn't have to worry about them. They knew where our table was and the water park was well staffed with lifeguards that were actually very attentive.


We spent the entire day at the water park. Emma and I went up after lunch to take a short nap and then we returned. After dinner, I took Emma up to get ready for bed and Mike took the kids back down for the rest of the evening. We even went for a couple of hours on Friday morning after checking out and before leaving to head home.