- June 12th, 2016, 1:16 am
#88331
Here's my impressions on my first trip to the water park. We had a great time and my kids loved it. But I'm very detailed oriented and notice every little thing.
Parking lot is a mess. Its tore up in places. Its patched a million times. Many spots are blocked off for construction. As you start moving backwards you start hitting into the south gate parking so its really hard to find a spot. Since the left drive is one way you have to use the right side to work your way backwards, but then people start parking in the middle of the drive too, as well as around the construction fence, etc.
No signage anywhere to direct you around the area. So I had no idea initially where lockers were, etc. Never found the life vests. Didn't know where first aid was. The area is kindof sprawling so its hard to get your bearings the first time there.
Bathroom near the gate...toilets were absolutely nasty and i saw one faucet stuck on, and another one the temperature wouldn't adjust (stuck on scalding hot).
Lockers were way overpriced...like $17 for a small one. One kiosk was broke. Another one had a guy standing there for 10 minutes trying to get it to accept his dollar bills. There were employees stationed here but they didn't do anything to help. This appears to be the same system used by Busch Gardens and its a lot cheaper there.
Not enough chairs....every single one either had someone in it or towels. Although I suspect a lot of people just claimed a chair then went elsewhere in the water park. I saw plenty of space for more chairs if they wanted to add them.
Apparently kids under a certain height have to have life vests to go down slides but I didn't see any signs anywhere saying that or directing you where to find them...so that was annoying waiting in line all that time and not being able to go down. I had asked one of the employees at the bottom if my son would ride and he thought so but didn't really know anything as he had never been stationed at the top. It seems like a stupid rule to me for kid slides... I could understand it for a pool but not for slides with a few inches of water.
We spent most of our time in the kids splash areas...these were a lot of fun. But the slides had very low capacity with long lines. And there really wasn't any designed line area so people just all jumbled up. You had net bridges coming right into the middle of the line. Also they had cannons and things were you could shoot strangers in line, which while we are there to get wet, I'm not there to have a stranger constantly shooting water directly in my face. Also I noticed a bunch of the water features didn't work...some of them had no water coming out, one was a spinning thing that was stuck.
They didn't have any employees in the kids areas we saw other than manning the top or bottom of the slides. One kid was crying for his mother for minutes and finally I just walked with him until we found her.
My son got a scrape on the concrete in one of the pools and I couldn't find any employees to direct me to first aid.
Also the water really had an unpleasant smell. Not the chlorine smell but something else they treat it with.
Overall though it was fun and since we have season pass it's a nice place to stop for a few hours.
