A couple of weeks ago, we took a family vacation to Williamsburg, VA. It was Homeschool Days, so the tickets for the Colonial Village were majorly discounted. In conjunction, a lot of hotels in the area offer deals.
The Great Wolf Lodge is one of them. If you've never heard of them, these are hotels with an indoor water park as part of the hotel. Normally, the cheapest room is about $219/night during the week and a whopping $489/night on the weekend. During Homeschool Days, every room is discounted (if you use the online code) to $169/night. We chose a kid-friendly Cabin Suite that had a mini log cabin room with bunk beds and a single twin bed in it.
The kids were all very excited to see their room!
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| Ezra got the bottom bunk |
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| Olivia took the top bunk |
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| And Gabe took the single bed. |
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| Gabe brandishing his balloon sword. |
We hadn't even told them about the water park...
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| The giant fort in the middle of the water park. That bucket on top would tip over every 5 minutes and unload a torrent of water on everyone below. |
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| The younger kids area had lots of neat things for them to play with. |
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| Ezra and Gabe spent almost the entire time on these slides, foregoing naps in favor of shambling zombie-like up the stairs to slide down again and again. |
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| The backside of the fort had two slides that Olivia spent many an hour going down. |
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| The bigger slides took a bit more courage for her to brave, but after a couple of times, she was going on them all by herself! |
Besides these slides, there was a lazy river and a wave pool, both of which were pretty nice. There was also another pool with basketball hoops and balls and a rope/lily pad obstacle course for the kids to cross. It was quite an advantage being able to leave your room and not have to carry everything with you to the water park. They had life jackets and towels available and a (not too terribly priced) snack bar for food.
We brought our food to the hotel and ate in the room for breakfast and lunch, but the room only has a dorm-sized fridge and a microwave, so don't think about full-kitchen style cooking. And the only table in the room was a small 4-seater, so not exactly good for the family to gather around at mealtime. The restaurants in the hotel were a little steep ($10 per person for breakfast, $20 for dinner), so we chose instead to sample some of the local food in Williamsburg.
We highly recommend
Food For Thought as a great place to eat. We called ahead to let them know we were bringing 4 kids and they had a table set up for us when we got there. The staff was extremely friendly and bent over backwards to make sure we (and I mean ALL of us, not just Rebecca and I) were happy. The food was wonderful and they had trivia cards on the table for us to entertain ourselves with while waiting.
All-in-all, we had a wonderful time there and the price was about what we thought it should be. We couldn't see spending the $289/night ($529 on the weekend!!!!) that they normally charge for the room, but $169 seemed fair. After the trip we decided that pairing this with Colonial Williamsburg wasn't such a hot idea (the kids were WIPED!) so next time we may just go to Williamsburg for the history and take a mid-week vacation to Concord, NC where they've built a Great Wolf Lodge.
