Tales of the Great Wolf

January marked our family's quasi-annual trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls, and this time, it was personal. For several years, we'd been going now, thanks in large part to a discounted rate from my then- and again current-employer, but this was the first time we'd be going for two nights instead of one. Especially now that the kids were getting old enough to do partake in a fuller range of activities and still have energy to keep going right up until the water park closed and kicked us out, we figured it would actually be worth the investment to extend our stay. This way, we had time to take full advantage of the water slides and wave pool, and the kids could also run around and play MagiQuest, an augmented reality game (ARG) set up across the hotel, where children could wave their magic wands at various objects, collect gold and artifacts, slay magical beasts, and in general, go on an epic fantasy adventure, the type of thing that would have been right up my ally as a kid. Definitely just as a kid.

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.