Great Wolf Lodge Williamsburg

Tuesday was YB's 5th birthday. He was born at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, CA. I was actually born at the same hospital, but in the older pink buildings that have since been torn down. Last year I wrote a Happy Birthday post for him with a collection of some of my favorite YB pictures.

In honor of YB's birthday, we went down to Williamsburg, VA, and met up with our old friends and neighbors from Hawaii. Their two boys, Z & C, are the same ages as our boys, and our boys were devastated when they transferred to Norfolk. YB has continued to talk about his friend C ever since we parted ways back in September 2007.

We stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg and had a great time. (Aside: This is actually the second time we've been to a Great Wolf Lodge. The first time was when we stopped at Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City on our way across country.)

Reunion at the Great Wolf Lodge

In case you're not familiar with the Great Wolf Lodge, it's a hotel built around a ginormous INDOOR waterpark.

Obligatory Blunoz Self-Portrait

Many hotels in vacation spots will have a weather report posted in the elevator. I really liked the top line of the weather report in the GWL elevator:


Instead of room keys, they issue these waterproof bracelets with an RFID chip to open the door to your room.


If you stay one night at the GWL, then you get admission to the water park for both the day before and the day after your night's stay. So we went and played in the water park on Sunday, stayed the night, then played in the water park again on Monday.

ES and I enjoyed going down the super-fast double-tube slides like this one:

Yellow Slide forward view:



Yellow slide rear-view:



YB didn't work up the courage to go on the super-fast slides with us. Even so, I think YB enjoyed his birthday weekend...

YB in the little kid's section

YB in the lazy river

The camera wasn't the only one with a dead battery at the end of day two.

YB chose Foreign Residence of Tasty Flatbreads for his birthday lunch.

Other pointers if you are headed for the GWL:

- Attire: Apparently I missed the memo on this one. It seems all anybody else packed for their kids were swimming suits and pajamas. All the kids in the water park were wearing swimming suits (no surprise there). All the kids in the restaurant at dinner were wearing pajamas. After I stopped to think about it, it made sense to me. Spend the day in the water park, go to your room and shower / bath / get cleaned up, put the kids in their pajamas, eat dinner, put the kids to bed. Why wear another outfit just for dinner, eh?

- Food: If you eat in the restaurant, stick to the buffet. If you decide to order something off the menu, be prepared to wait a LONG time. We got there at 6:30. They told us it'd be 20 minutes for a table for 8. We were seated at 7:09. Those of us eating off the buffet commenced stuffing our faces at 7:10. The three orders of food that went with the waitress to the kitchen were not delivered until 7:52. I think they had to go hire a chef, go to the grocery store to buy the ingredients, go to Walmart to buy the pots and pans... Like I said, just eat the buffet.

- Timing: If you have a choice, I recommend going on a weekday for less crowds and shorter lines for the waterslides. Our visit was over MLK Jr. weekend. The lines for the four-person slides (the tornado and the canyon) seemed to take between 20-30 minutes, and the ride lasts about 20-30 seconds (totally NOT worth it - we did each once and didn't bother going back). The lines for the single and double tube slides actually moved pretty quick. I don't think we ever waited more than like 5 or 10 minutes for one of those slides.

- MagiQuest: Not all of the fun things to do at GWL are in the water park. There's a video arcade, there's a big animatronic show around the clock tower in the lobby, there's story time by the fireplace after dinner, and there's MagiQuest.


There are two increments to your investment in this adventure.

First, if you go into the MagiQuest shop, you can buy the base-model, simple magic wand for $14.99.

The Mark 1 Mod 0 Magic Wand

Warning: The MagiQuest shop has all sorts of trinkets and merchandising to further drain your wallet. You might want to just go in and buy the wand(s) for your kid(s) without them so he/she/they don't go nuts wanting to buy capes and amulets and wand-holsters and fancy wand-toppers and wand-chains and higher-end wands. Whoa, I just had a flashback to RIMPAC.

With this basic wand, there are lots of things you can do around the first floor of the hotel. Wherever you see a Q symbol painted on something, if you wave your magic wand at it, you will cause something to happen. For example, you can turn the lights on...

YB turns the lights on with his wand.

The second increment of this adventure costs another $10 to register for the actual adventure quest. On the second and third floor of the hotel are four corridors of things like treasure chests, spell books, crystals, paintings, and other artifacts. There are actually several quests you can do. The first simple one to get you into the game is the quest for the Lightning Rune. You have to find a suit of armor, a shield, and a sword, then you have to go talk to a gargoyle to get your Lightning Rune.

The suit of armor in the first quest.

So you search the hallways of the hotel until you find each item and wave your magic wand at it. It'll light up and play a sound telling you that you found it.

Lesson Learned / A Word of Advice: Overall, I think it's a pretty fun game. However (comma) we paid to register each of the four magic wands for all four boys in our group, and that was a mistake. In hindsight, if I could turn the clock back and have a "do-over," then I would have only paid the extra $10 to register ONE wand as our "team" wand.

By registering all four wands, we all went around together finding all the things, and we had to stand there as each child waved his magic wand and waited for the artifact to light up and play the sound effect, etc, etc. Rotate children, NEXT! Wave the magic wand, wait for it to do light and sound effects again. Rotate children, NEXT! Wave the magic wand, wait for it to do light and sound effects again. Rotate children, NEXT!

That may not be so bad you say. Well, it got pretty frustrating when we got to the gargoyle and it wouldn't give the birthday boy the Lightning Rune because it said he didn't find all the artifacts. So the other three boys took off on the next quest while I went and back-tracked with YB to retouch the first artifacts.

It would have been a lot easier and quicker if we just had one registered team wand (or maybe one registered wand per family - one for our two boys and one for their two boys). OR, I guess the alternative would have been a little more parental QA on the tapping of each magic wand to make sure each one registered at each step.

Update 01/26/10: In case you were wondering, can you reuse the wand / use it when you go back to Great Wolf Lodge another time? Yes, you can. However, when you pay that $10 registration fee, it only lasts for a certain number of days. If you go back a year later, then you'll be able to reuse the wand, and it'll work for the lights and animals on the first floor, but you'll have to pay $10 to register it again to play the MagiQuest game on the second and third floors.

Backtracking and fulfilling promises

Okay, I promised you the video of YB doing is Elvis Dance at Dave's wedding. Here it is:



Then, I told you about how much fun I had riding the dinocoaster at Legoland three times in a row.


Dontchya like how the lady walks right in front of the camera, then notices my wife with the camera in her hand and STOPS right SMACK in the middle of the field of view?

Then, I told you the video of my wife rolling down the grassy knoll with the boys at our rest stop in Alamosa, Colorado was better than the still photo. Here's that video...



Then, I promised you videos of the Great Wolf Lodge. For those of you just passing by, if you want a sample of what the Great Wolf Lodge was like, then check this out:



For the sake of anyone doing Google searches for the Great Wolf Lodge, I went back and embedded a few of the videos in that blog post. For grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends who want to see ALL the videos from the lazy river and the water slides, go to my YouTube channel and you can watch all the videos.

I think I'm all caught up on uploading videos to YouTube now.

Travel Log: Great Wolf Lodge

We've wanted to visit a Great Wolf Lodge ever since we first heard of their existence a few years ago. It's a hotel built around an indoor waterpark. I have an aversion to the sun and will spend like an hour putting on sun screen before going outdoors, so the idea of an INDOOR waterpark to me is just AWESOME.

There are several Great Wolf Lodges all across the midwest and eastern seaboard, so when we planned our trip across country, we wanted to be sure to visit at least ONE Great Wolf Lodge. Thursday night we stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City.

Cue sound effect: Angelic choir singing hallelujah chorus.

We.

Had.

A.

Ball.

Me and YB in the Green Waterslide

There were five big waterslides twisting and turning all over the park like a bowl of spaghetti. Three of them weren't suitable for the boys because they either (a) had pitch-black dark tunnels that freaked the boys out, or (b) weren't for innertubes and could only be ridden solo, or both.

YB and me coming out of the blue waterslide.

On two of the waterslides, the blue one and the green one, you could ride two-person innertubes down, and although there were tunnels, the plastic was translucent enough you could see the turns and the dips and know what was coming. These two were a blast and we rode them at least a dozen times.

Me and YB on the Green Waterslide


Me and YB on the Blue Waterslide

Unfortunately, I took ES on one of the slides with the dark tunnel the first time, and it kinda freaked him out, so he wouldn't go on any more slides for a while after that.

This was the yellow slide that scared ES.

After he saw YB go with me several times on the blue and the green slides, then he decided he would go with us. Thank goodness he did, because he liked it so much he ended up going by himself several times.

ES coming off the waterslide solo

We also took a liesurely ride on the lazy river and played in the little kid pool with the little kid slides, too.

Floating along the lazy river.

ES being a goofball in the lazy river.


Video along the lazy river.

I took several videos, and I know I keep promising to share videos with you, but I have limited time to post this and get to bed. I will upload the videos at some point and let you know when they're up on YouTube. Videos uploaded 10/12/2008. There are a couple more videos of the kiddie pool area on my YouTube channel.

It would have been fun to spend more than one night there. Unfortunately, they were booked Friday night because of a big event going on at the nearby racetrack.

We spent 3 hours at the waterpark on Friday morning then got cleaned up and had some lunch at Chipotle. [Cue sound effect: Angelic choir singing hallelujah chorus] Man I love Chipotle! I've really missed it a lot since we left Virginia last year.

Next, I have to give a shout out of thanks to FastNav for this recommendation. After lunch, we drove into Kansas City to visit the National World War I museum.

Wow.

The monument was dedicated in like 1921 with several of the commanding generals from WWI present. I was afraid the museum inside was going to be pretty old and stuffy and boring for the kids. On the contrary, this was a really well laid out, very modern and interactive museum.

After we entered the doors, we walked across a glass bridge over 9,000 poppy flowers - one flower for every 1,000 people killed in World War I. (The photo doesn't really do it justice.)

After crossing the bridge, we entered a small movie theater and watched a 12-minute film about the events leading up to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The museum is set up in sort of an oval divided into quadrants. This theater was in the first quadrant.

We exited the theater going counter clockwise around the oval, and the second quadrant or section of the museum was all about 1914 to 1917, before the United States joined the war.

There were very high-tech, interactive displays like these light tables. You used light pens to touch things on the table to bring up videos or sound effects or flip pages for more information.

Then there were also lots of static displays of weapons and uniforms, maps and photographs.

I took this picture to use the camera flash to show and explain the rifle grooves in the barrel to the boys.

Next, we continued counter-clockwise into the third quadrant along a walkway over a life-size diorama of a battlefield with a huge (like 100 foot wide) screen in the back showing a second movie. This was a 15 minute movie about the reasons why the United States entered the war. Like the first movie, this was also very well done and held both my interest as well as the boys' interest.

YB in front of the WW I Monument

Finally, we walked counter-clockwise into the fourth quadrant of the museum that covers from 1917 to 1919 while the United States was involved in the war. By the time we got here though, we were pushing our time limit on making it to dinner with my aunt, so he quickly browsed as we walked through to the exit and got back on the road.

Kansas City

We made good time to my aunt's house, and she took us to an awesome local place called Heroes for dinner. I knew I was in the south again (or close enough to it) because I got to have fried ocra with my dinner. :-9

Old Drum
and the Warrensburg Courthouse

Along the way to and from dinner, we passed by the statue of Old Drum in front of the Warrensburg Courthouse. The term "man's best friend" originated here in a very eloquent eulogy and closing argument in a court case for one guy shooting his neighbor's dog, Old Drum.

That's it for tonight folks. More to follow on our visit to Whiteman AFB and our stop in St. Louis.