Hungry like the Great Wolf

A couple weekends before Christmas, my wife surprised the family with a trip to Great Wolf Lodge. I use the word "surprise" lightly, because my wife is the worst at keeping secrets. The weekend before the trip, my wife told me she had a surprise for the family and asked me to guess, and I immediately guessed Great Wolf Lodge, because we hadn't been able to go on our yearly pilgrimage the previous year and we were due, she had said she had a surprise for the whole family the next weekend, and I do occasionally display Sherlock Holmes levels of deductive brilliance. Also, my wife is the worst at keeping secrets.

For those not in the know, Great Wolf Lodge is a chain of indoor water parks. On their website, they bill themselves as a "water park and resort," though I think it's a rather loose definition of the word "resort." It basically means that it's like a giant hotel with a water park inside of it. When I think of "resorts," I think of beach-side hotels, giant urban atrocities situated close by the ocean in places that have only ever heard of snow in legends passed down from their ancestors, where the liquor flows freely and the kids and elderly are locked away in a carefully guarded, segregated area for the day or not allowed on the premises at all. This is not a knock against Great Wolf Lodge. And maybe "resort" is technically the correct term (or the closest barring a better alternative), it's just not the word I would have chosen had I worked in their marketing department.

That being said, my family and I love Great Wolf Lodge. It became something of a family tradition by accident a few years back when we went on a special company discount for the company I was working with at the time. One thing about Great Wolf Lodge is that it is most definitely not cheap. It's cheaper than flying down to the Dominican Republic or Mexico, but it still costs a pretty penny. Despite this, it kind of turned into a yearly tradition for us, except for 2017 when we were unable to go due in large part to me changing jobs twice. So it was a pleasant (sort-of) surprise when my wife revealed that she'd squirrelled away some funds from our monthly budget over the course of the year to keep the tradition alive.

Some of the more cynical might describe Great Wolf Lodge as a tourist trap, and I'd be hard pressed to put up much of an argument. It's a place designed to separate people from their money, and it does so very effectively.

But it's also a shitload of fun.

You don't have to say much more beyond "waterslide" to sell me. I'm likely going to be in that line. Waterslides are really fun. And the waterslides at Great Wolf Lodge are great. There's the Wooly Mammoth, where the entire family can be terrified together going down in a giant rubber tube. The Niagara Rapids Run is so far the only waterslide I've been on that combines elements of a roller coaster in that you're travelling both up and down throughout the length of its run. The latest addition which wasn't finished the last time we went was the Wolf Tail, which is for individual riders, but it starts out with an almost vertical twenty-foot drop straight down, which nobody else in my family had the intestinal fortitude to try this go around.

Great Wolf Lodge is also a ton more fun now that my kids are at a decent age. It honestly kind of sucks going with toddlers or younger kids that kind of limit which rides you can go on and force you to stay in the kiddie areas. It's not a total wash, but it definitely makes a huge difference for the adults when your kids can go on every ride, and are willing to go on every ride (except the Wolf Tale, you cowards).

My kids are also old enough now to go out on their own for a bit. I think my wife and I are in a transitional period with our children where we're slowly (but surely) realizing that they are getting a lot more independent. We're at the point now where we can send them off to go on the waterslides by themselves and hang out in the hot tub without having to worry about them drowning or to a lesser extent walking off with some stranger. My children are in a good sweet spot right now where they're young enough to enjoy these kind of rides and old enough to venture out on their own. I'm almost certain that in a couple years when my daughter makes her first forays into teenager-hood, there's going to be a point where she hate this kind of family stuff.

There's also a tonne of other stuff to do. There's an interactive game called Magic Quest that entails going around to certain sections of the hotel with your magic wand to complete quests. There's some kind of interface that allows you to wave your wand at certain objects to gain items and cause them to react (for example, a treasure chest physically opens up and you get a certain amount of video game "gold" to use on your quests). I guess it would loosely fit the definition of an augmented reality game, in that there's a game world overlaid on the real one. This was the first year we gave it a try, and the kids kids had a blast. Honestly, it's exactly the kind of thing I would have enjoyed at their age (and maybe still enjoy now...).

There's also a bowling alley, a kids area where you can colour your own t-shirt or pillow case, one of those stations where you can stuff your own animal, and an arcade in the basement (they seem to flourish in places where the sun don't shine).

This was the first year we were able (and willing) to get around to all of the different activities that didn't involve water or slides, and we ended up having a really great time with all of it. It was kind of the perfect way to cap off the year. It costs a chunk of change, yes, but I guess it's about the value (or maybe perceived value) of what you're getting in return. For my family, it's totally worth it because we always end up having a lot of fun and we have a lot of great memories of our times there. I think, in the end, maybe that's the only metric that matters in deciding the value of how you choose to spend your time and money. Plus they have really great wings.