‘Great Wolf Lodge’ Articles at Sweetnicks

An indoor water park in South New Jersey makes a perfect escape for a day trip.

When I took the kids and a friend of Nick’s to Dorney Park in September, it was an overcast and dreary day. Luckily, all was ok in terms of riding the rides and doing sightseeing, but it was too iffy for the water park, so we skipped it.

And the kids were majorly disappointed, because they are all about water. Like they would seriously spend all day, every day at the lake, the beach, or any other small or large body of water if I let them.

So I promised them a consolation prize.

That I would plan a trip to Sahara Sam’s for the next month (October), and we would make a day out of it.

Little did they know, I already had free passes to Sahara Sam’s, tucked away for just the right time.

‘Cause I’m sneaky like that.

(And although people might think I’m silly for collecting Coke rewards, I’ve been doing it for about three years now, and that’s exactly how I got the free passes. So there.)

The indoor water park is open from 10 am until 7 pm, and our goal was to leave in the morning, when everyone was up, and be down there by lunch. It’s about an hour and a half away from us, but a pretty easy, mostly highway drive.

Which was totally narrated by two eleven year old boys in the back seat and their video game sound effects.

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Back in July, as Nick’s birthday was fast approaching, I asked him what he’d like to do in terms of a party. He decided that he wanted to take one friend away for a trip to a indoor water park resort, instead of having a party. At the time, he was thinking about Great Wolf Lodge, where we had been with Mystic and his kids back in October (super late review coming one of these days!), but then I heard about CoCo Key in Mount Laurel, which was a little farther from us (and in the opposite direction), but the same general concept.

And so a plan was born.

It doesn’t make sense to me to go to an indoor water park during the summer, so we planned to do it when the weather started getting a little cooler (and an escape to an 80 degree indoor resort was more in order). Between sports schedules and various other interferences, it finally landed on the calendar mid-October.

Like Great Wolf, there is a hotel in the same building as the resort, as well as a restaurant, making it very convenient. After our last soccer games on Saturday morning, we packed up the car, picked up Nick’s friend and Mystic’s daughter, Taylor, and headed off.

I ended up getting a great package deal that included the hotel room, four passes to their water park, four passes to the nearby Philadelphia Zoo (separate review coming soon), and $20 worth of credit for the hotel’s arcade. We checked in, and made our way to the room, ready to unload our stuff and get bathing suits on right away.

As soon as we walked in, I noticed the handle and lock hanging off the sliding door that led outside. In a first floor room. Me. Four kids. First floor room with a broken slider. No bueno. I called the front desk and the phone rang and rang and rang. I gave up and schlepped all the way back to the lobby (there is a lot of walking to be had at this hotel), and explained the problem. They promised to send an engineer down to look at it and would move us if it couldn’t be fixed.

We waited 20 minutes and decided to head off to the water park in the meantime. By the time we returned over two hours later, they still hadn’t come, I voiced my opinions, and we eventually got moved. Much better.

The kids and I watch Hotel Impossible, and it might have spoiled us. Or maybe we just like dust-free hotels. The bathroom had a $10 coffeemaker (at best) with a serious layer of dust on it. The dresser’s finish was wearing thin. The tv in the first room didn’t work. The rooms are a stark dichotomy to the image the hotel seems to be trying to project. They have bell hops, ready to help you with your bags, but the rooms look seriously tired. But the beds and bedding were bright white and clean (except for that all-important top blanket that we always remove right away; ick), and it was a decent place to stay. For what we needed, it was fine.

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Visit: Sahara Sam’s {West Berlin, New Jersey}

Visit: CoCo Key Water Resort, Hotel ML, Talia’s Restaurant {New Jersey}