Hawaiian Waters Adventure ParkUpdated with Some Pictures 12/25

Hawaiian Waters: For Day 3 of our push to support the Hawaiian tourism industry, we went to the Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park for a good portion of the day. Overall, it was a great time. This place is a fairly big park with several different waterslide rides. My two favorites were the Big Kahuna and the Volcano Express. On Big Kahuna, you ride an innertube REALLY FAST through a bunch of twists and turns so that with your speed, it sends you up sideways on the wall through the turns. On the Volcano Express, LW and I both caught air on the second bump - that was kinda freaky!

Keiki (little kid) Section of the Park
(Note the horrible December weather we're having here)

There were a few minor things I learned the hard way, so I figured I'd share the gouge with you for anyone else headed to the water park anytime in the future.

Notes to self for future trips to Hawaiian Waters:
1) WEAR SHOES!!! The pavement is very slippery when wet, and I slipped like 5 times on my way walking from where we set up camp with our towels on beach recliners to our first waterslide ride. Luckily, LW bought us some awesome Speedo watershoes a few years back and we had them with us today. I put them on for the rest of the day and they worked like champs both in and out of the water.

Blunoz Family Water-Shoes

If you DON'T wear shoes, this is what'll happen.
I actually think this an ancient Hawaiian symbol for
"Slippery When Wet"

2) BRING FOOD ...and leave it in your car. You are not allowed to bring in any outside food or drinks into the park, and they search your bags on your way into the park. So just leave the food in your car, and go back out to your car to eat lunch or snack or whatever. Or, you could even just hop in your car and drive just across the highway to the shopping center with several places to eat.
The reason being is that the food at their snack bar is disgusting and WAY overpriced. In fact, let's play a quick game of The Price is Right. Take a guess how much I paid for two kids meals (one with a hot dog the color of a pale white bratwurst, the other with a few nasty hard little stone-age weapons that resembled chicken nuggets), and two cheeseburger meals (cheeseburger, fries, drink) and two churros. Go ahead, take a guess! I'll type the answer out in text so the answer isn't glaring you in the face. Fifteen dollars? Twenty dollars? I paid twenty-eight dollars for this fine feast, and my stomach is still revolting against me for it. Plus, there were no lids or straws for the drinks, and the churros were bland and had the texture of corrugated cardboard. Bottom Line: DON'T EAT THE FOOD!

3) Go During the Off-Season, but Pay Attention to the Ride Hours. I don't mean to imply you should NOT go during the "ON" season. Since this was my first time there, I have no idea what the crowds are like other times of the year. However, we had ZERO problems with crowds at the park today. We actually saw at least two other families there that we knew from Navy housing and from YS's preschool class. There were practically no lines to wait in for the water slides, which was really nice. The problem was, they have a reduced staff during the off season, so they didn't have enough lifeguards to man ALL the waterslides at once. So they set up a rotation system where one slide would be open for 30 minutes, then they'd close that one and open another one for 30 minutes, etc. For the most part, this worked out okay. For the lazy river though, it was only open from 12:30 to 2:30, so if you wanted to do the lazy river, you HAD to go during THAT time period.

Daddy and the YS-fish Out of Water

4) Pink Wristbands. If you have little kids that are good swimmers, then they can take a simple swim test to earn a pink wrist-band that will allow them to go on most of the slides that normally require you to be 48 inches or taller. Note that they only administer the swim test in the hurricane lagoon with the big waves during short periods when they stop the wave machine. So if you want to do this, I would recommend finding out when the next time the wave machine will be stopped, and be there to get the swim test done.
The swim test consists of your child climbing down a ladder in the deep end and swimming about 10 feet to a lifeguard, then turning around and swimming back to the ladder again. They can't grab onto anything or have any help from a parental unit during the test though. Both my boys can swim like fish now, and I KNOW they could have passed the test. They both chickened out. That's okay though, there was plenty to keep them occupied in the little kids section. L & A took turns watching the boys with LW and me so we could ride the bigger slides.

ES Walking the Log
The log was held in place by chains attached to the bottom so it didn't float away, but it was pretty wobbly and a challenge to walk on. I was proud of ES for making it across on his own.

We're contemplating buying the annual passes to the water park. We'd have to go to the water park 3 times in the next year in order to make the annual pass worth while. LW was thinking it'd be a nice place to take the boys while they're on spring break and I'm at work in a couple of months.

We left Hawaiian Waters with just enough time to come home, shower and get dressed, and leave for our church's Christmas Eve service. They did a GREAT job at FPC tonight. It seems kind of odd spending your day in the sun at a waterslide park and then going to a Christmas Eve church service though.

Well, it's late. I gotta get to bed because you know the boys will be up bright and early to see what Santa brought them. I'll add pictures to this post later.

Update 04/27/08: I wrote another post on a subsequent visit to Hawaiian Waters.