The weekend started off with a drive to Rock Island, IL where Lyssa Layne had a signing. AR was my mini-PA for the day, dressed the part and all. She found another author's daughter and the two were immediately besties. After the signing, we drove to Burlington, Iowa and stayed at the Pzazz Resort.
I didn't tell AR anything at all about the hotel or what they had there so she literally thought all there was to do was a regular hotel pool. Boy was her mind blown! At the Pzazz, they have a place called Fun City which has an indoor and outdoor water park, go carts, arcade, bowling, ball pit/ballground, laser tag, and probably a whole lot of other stuff I'm leaving out!
Overall, we had a great time time and my girl is WORE out. I'll give you a run down of what all we did, the pros and cons, and share some sweet pics, too. For the price of what it cost to stay at a chain hotel, we got our hotel room, indoor water park, and $20 on a game card. I paid $10 extra for Ballocity, the ball pit/playground, and the Sky Tykes which I thought was a pretty sweet deal. Your hotel room includes four passes to the indoor water park but since it was just the two of us, they gave us the $20 game card and we got a coupon for half off Ballocity.
Saturday, we checked in around 5PM, and I'll be honest, the place was insane! There was almost no parking and there were people everywhere. Immediately, I was beginning to wonder how this was going to be. I guess with it being spring break and the only local attraction in the rural Midwest, the place was a nuthouse! We saw at least four birthday parties going on in addition to guests staying at the hotel/resort and people that came and just paid daily admission.
We took our time unloading the car and getting to our room but of course, some little girl was in a hurry to get to the pool! This picture was taken on Sunday morning, nothing at all like what we walked into on Saturday. I will say that I have talked to two other families that went here in January and February and said it was NOTHING like what we experienced with so many people so I guess it just depends on when you go. Anyway, we walk in and again, insanity! The recreation professional in me was having a panic attack because there was only two lifeguards working, both in the lazy river area, and easily a hundred plus people in this pool. AR got to swimming in the kid area here, she loved the slide and she is so her mother's child as she was telling kids that "slides are for going down, not up" as child after child tried to climb up the slide and she waited for them to move. We were barely there for fifteen minutes when someone pooped in the kid area and everyone had to get out. It was a blessing in disguise as it cleared out a lot of people but it was still pretty full.
I was hesitant to put our stuff down because there were so many people there but I found a nice man who let us share their table. AR and I got in the lazy river and other pool area and chatted with his wife and granddaughter. Turns out that their neighbor is a lady I work with for one of the author signings! Their granddaughter and AR were the same age so the girls had a blast playing together and in typical preschool behavior, the girls had made us a dinner date before the swimming was over! We swam for a long time with them then everyone changed and we ate dinner with them at the restaurant in the hotel. We split a pizza and it was sooo good! Even better, the girls got to dance on the dance floor and had a blast playing together. We might even see them again in July! I've said it before and I'll say it again but I strongly believe people are placed in our paths at the right time for the right reasons.
Now, while the kid pool was closed, they shocked the pool which is proper protocol but there was no lifeguard on duty so kids kept getting into it. Again, the recreation professional in me was having palpitations especially as one of the lifeguards in the lazy river left their post to tell kids to get out. I've just been around pools too long to notice that kind of stuff because no one else seemed to notice. It was a good pool so long as you watched your own children and like all pools, don't depend on the lifeguards to "babysit" your kids for you. Way too overcrowded but it sounded like it wasn't normally like that. AR had a great time so really, that's all that matters?
After swimming, we had dinner with our new friends. Again, the pizza was delish! They had a twenty-eight inch pizza-it was insane the size of that thing!!! When our bellies were full, we told our new friends goodbye then headed over to the arcade. We played a few games but AR really wanted to do the go-carts. It was later Saturday night but we still waited in line over thirty minutes to ride these babies! I'm glad we did because it was my favorite part of the night!
The inside turns were a little tricky but I got the hang of them pretty fast and I'm happy to say that I didn't crash us! After the go-carts, we played out the rest of the money on our arcade cards and traded in our tickets for trinkety stuff that I'm sure will be lost before Wednesday.
We slept in on Sunday which was nice but no worries, we were the first ones in line for Ballocity! It was basically a giant playground with tons of balls inside it. They had a few different slides which was AR's favorite. I gave her my phone and told her to take some pics for me to post on the blog. This was the first pic she took.
I told her that was a great pic, very creative, and I would totally use it but I said, go take more. She always wants to use my phone to take pictures and the one time I ask her to, she brings me back one! Well, she took my phone but I didn't get any more pics... I got videos! They're pretty awesome though...
This was the giant tub of balls that randomly rained down on the kids!
You can see AR in the left side of the pic trying to dodge the rain of balls.
And this is the outside view of Ballocity.
This was AR's favorite shooter but you had to go to the first floor to carry balls up to the second floor so she could only take a handful at a time.
I hadn't planned on her doing the Sky Tykes but it was right next to Ballocity and she really wanted to do it. Since I'd only paid half-price for Ballocity, I figured why not. She really wanted to do the big kids one but you had to be 48 inches so she had to do the smaller one. You get 15 minutes which at first I thought wasn't long enough but after 10 minutes, she was bored and ready to be done.
Here's just one of the obstacles that they could do.
She mastered it pretty quickly so then I would tell her to run or bunny hop to mix it up a little bit. She enjoyed it though although the allure of it wore off pretty quickly.
Like I said above, it was a great little weekend getaway trip for spring break. Our room was supposed to be non-smoking but the bathroom reeked of smoke. We weren't in the room much though so it didn't bother us too much. It was only about three hours from St. Louis so the drive wasn't bad. I feel like we did a lot and there was a huge variety. I think if we'd gone on another weekend that wasn't so busy, it would've been better but all the people didn't slow AR down. She had an awesome weekend and I can hear her snoring from her room! It was the perfect start for our little spring break staycation!
2 comments :
What a fun time - good job mommy! :)
How fun!!!! This place looks awesome!
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