Over last weekend, we finally succumbed to the combined pressure of a friend's birthday party and years of television advertising and took the kids for an overnight at Great Wolf Lodge.
Pretty much everything about the place filled our kids with ridiculous glee: The large indoor water park, the availability of pizza for breakfast, the robotic arm that could be instructed to put Skittles and rainbow sprinkles on a cup of FroYo, and, of course, the opportunity to fight virtual dragons by waving a $22.95 plastic wand in a MagiQuest game.
Beyond the ridiculous glee of one's offspring, the main advantage for parents is the complete absence of adult guests who are unfettered by children. No one expects a lobby that is not besieged by groups of children rubbing their shoes on the furniture and scrambling up the wooden statues of bears, or a hallway that is not menaced by stampeding wand-waving kids, or a buffet line unpopulated by six year olds spilling their smiley face french fries on the floor, or a dining room free of toddlers shrieking in terror at the sight of a person in a large furry bear costume.
The all kid environment enables a pleasant lull in the constant parenting battles around appropriate behavior in public and the lack thereof. One can then use the additional cognitive space to contemplate important questions like: what sort of effect on the human eye or lung does an indoor atmosphere that is mostly composed of chlorine and chlorine byproducts have? Or what sort of organisms can cause large black swaths on orange plastic slides while being constantly soaked in chlorine, and are these organisms similar to those extremophiles found bathed in hydrogen sulfide on the ocean floor? Or how much useful commercial data is the resort harvesting from tracking the movements of parents and children through its halls via their electronic wristbands?
The kids had a fantastic time, and I am sure I will be able to mull over these questions further on a future visit.
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