Yesterday, we drove to Erie Pennsylvania to play at Splash Lagoon. Its about an hour and 45 minutes north of here.
First, sticker shock: the price to get in was about as much as getting into Disneyland. Surely, there was going to be something fantastic awaiting us inside. Only Goofy can demand that kind of money.
And, it was fun, but overpriced. Michelle did have a handful of coupons to save us some money, though.
Splash Lagoon is all indoors and sits about a mile south of Lake Erie, and they keep the temperature indoors at 85 degrees. So after your sticker shock, you are hit with an overpowering, humid atmosphere when you get in. In the summer, a person would be use to it, but it was still only 40 degrees outside when we got there. Anyway, they have 7 or 8 water slides, a treehouse for kids, pools, etc. We did have a good time there. This is saying a lot, too, because I HATE public pools.
Just think of it-- 100 people, some of which you KNOW uses Splash Lagoon as their chance to clean themselves up each year. You see all the kids (mine included) with snotty noses-- how many boogers are floating around you? What about the diapers-- how many of those are clean and unused versus the number of diapers that GET cleaned by use of the water slides? And, I know from personal experience at the place that, sometimes, you end up going backwards down the slide, getting an unwelcomed "cleanse" in the process. Again, where does that enema rinse go? Yes-- it dilutes itself around you and everyone else. Times that experience by 100 and you see what I mean.
Considering all this, we did have a good time. Ethan's favorite slide was "The Cyclone", which is a tube ride (he went with me) down a steep incline, where you are spit out into a giant toilet-bowl shaped contraption. Around and around you go in this thing, then you get flushed down the drain. It is fun, I'll admit. Chrissa liked "The Hurricane", which is similar to the Cyclone, only you go by yourself. There is no drain, only a drop into a pool of water. We could not get Michelle to go on any, so she and Preston and Amberlee stayed in the kiddie pools. All that time looking for a swimsuit, and she didn't get wet above the knees.
Looking back at the place, it is more toilet-themed than I had realized. The diapers, the enemas, the toilet-bowl shaped slides, the drop into the pool.
As for me, I got the most water ingestion on a kid slide. I climbed the treehouse with Ethan and Chrissa, where you get to the bottom by taking an open slide back down. It turns and twirls, and everyone is supposed to go by themselves. So, I sent Chrissa down first, then Ethan, and then I went. The slide keeper at the top was a bit shocked to see me there, but she sent me down anyways. I'll tell ya-- if this had been caught on video, I'd be
an internet sensation. Once I sat on the slide, all water down the slide stopped. I was like a giant plug. Down the slide I went, quite obviously more than the slide was designed to handle. A couple times I nearly shot over the top of a turn. Then, as I came to the end, I'm certain it was like seeing the 2006 tsunami. The slide went from no water, to a sudden deluge of water shooting over the sides like a freight train through a swimming pool. Even the lady at the bottom commented on the scene: "Wow". I got a nose full of water on that one. It was a great nasal rinse.
The one benefit to going to a public pool like this is that when you get in your swimming suit and get out in the open, you really don't look as bad as you thought you would. There were people of all sizes and shapes. Some guys were like walking mops they were so hairy. Some swimming suits barely held the person in-- the poor suits bulging at the seams. All of this played into my disgust at public pools. But, I did make the comment to Michelle that, considering, I really wasn't that awful looking.
We finished the day with dinner at TGI Fridays. We got home and scrubbed down. We had been in water most of the day, and ended the day in the shower. We had spent the day as fish.
