Goin' to the lodge, Great Wolf Lodge

We were invited last minute to go to the Great Wolf Lodge.  We drive by it all the time on the way to Portland and hear the commercials with the singing wolves that I've been wanting to go forever.  The thing is, the rooms are lik $400/night and everything else costs extra. It's usually cheaper to go to Disneyland!  Destiny's mom took advantage of a Groupon deal though, so we headed down there with Destiny, Janet, and Bridget and Joel.  We got there around noon.

We checked in and headed up the the room.  It was labeled "Kids Kamp".  We soon found out why, there was a cabin with a TV and bunk beds for the kids inside.

The cool thing is that you get wristbands for the water park, but those wrist bands are also your room key- you wave it in front of your door and it unlocks!  After some lunch, we headed down to the water park.  I was a bit nervous about Sawyer since he has always hated the water, and it took awhile to get him into the swimming pool at our last hotel.  I kind of tried to build up the swimming pool to him on the way down and reminded him how fun they are.  It totally worked...or else his fear is gone...because the first thing he did was run right into the wave pool!  He LOVED it and was smiling the whole time!  He spent hours going down the two water slides that were kids sized. (They had bigger ones but he doesn't have the best control on the slides I didn't think he would want to try the big ones since there is deeper water at the end and parents can't go with them)

Here he is going down the purple slide.  He went down these non-stop, it must have been well over 100 times.  Sometimes he'd take off without us knowing to the other place though giving us small heart attacks every now and then.  He didn't always flip on his stomach this way, I just didn't want to keep my phone in the water.



I went down the bigger slides with Joel since he had to have a buddy go.  He just couldn't go down the Tornado one so I had to go by myself with strangers when I tried that one one time.  Destiny could only go on certain things since her injury and the tornado was wayyy too bumpy for her neck.  They were very fun though.  There are 2 tube ones and a raft one besides the tornado.

Sawyer was SO sad when we had to go.  The first time was for dinner and he knew he was coming back, but the second we weren't sure.  He kept running off while we were getting changed to go down the slide one more time -.-  We wanted to see what the story time thing was all about though.  Each night the kids all meet in the lobby and there is some anamatronics show followed by a story read by a staff member.

Neither him nor Joel were really interested though.  Joel didn't go in the water after dinner because he wanted to play Magic Quest (you buy a wand then can go all over the hotel on different floors and stuff waving it at things to make them activate).  We decided to go back in the water for the rest of the 40 minutes before it closed.  We stayed until the whistles blew and kicked everyone out.

We got back and Sawyer and Joel played hide-and-seek.  This is how Sawyer hid:

They went down for bed, and Sawyer insisted on sleeping on the couch cushions with his new pet wolf.  It didn't last long though because Keri and Jackson were on their way.  I finally got him to sleep in the tiny cabin beds if I slept with him.  That was pretty uncomfortable!

The next morning we had to leave early because I had a couple appointments :(  I felt so bad because everyone else was getting their swim suits on and Sawyer was just walking around with a sad face saying "I want to go in the swimming pool.  I don't want to go home."  He wasn't throwing a fit, he just kept saying it so sad.  I wish we had time to go back, but I probably wouldn't be done until 4 ish and the lodge is about an hour+ from our house.

I'm so glad he had fun, and I had fun, and I'm glad we got to experience the lodge finally!