”You can walk in and out of the place without ever going outside. “Staying in one of the attached hotels is the best way to go,” Miriam, from Brockport, NY, assured me. In January, that seemed to me to be well worth the extra cost. Scott Enterprises owns three hotels-a Holiday Inn Express, a Marriott, and a Comfort Inn-that are connected directly to Splash Lagoon so that customers can avoid having to go outside for the entire length of their stay, should they so choose. Most of the slides are appropriate for about age six and up, although the extreme rides were a bit too exciting for my girls. Everything is indoors, although some of the covered slides stick out of the building (though not open to the elements). Splash Lagoon has five slides, two “extreme” water rides, a sports pool, a shallow-water little-kids pool with appropriately-sized slides, a splash pad for tots, the Tiki Tree House (“twelve levels of wet, wild activities”), two family hot tubs, and an adults-only whirlpool. It opened in 2003, expanded in 2006, and will expand further in late 2009 with the addition of a wave pool. Splash Lagoon draws happy customers mainly from upstate/central/western New York, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio, as well as Ontario, Canada. And, I will confess, periodically I put the laptop in the locker we rented, and join the kids on one of the slides, in a tube on the Lazy River, or in one of the two family whirlpools. Although it is a Friday in January in the early afternoon-therefore not yet very crowded-I can see I am not the only parent who had this idea. Although the wireless internet in the breakfast area of the Holiday Inn Express does not extend all the way into the water park, and despite the fact that it’s far too loud in here for a cell phone conference call, I am still doing plenty. Instead, I am in front of my laptop at Splash Lagoon, getting work done. I could be in front of my laptop at home, getting work done. We are on Day 2 of a two-day vacation at Splash Lagoon in Erie, PA.
My girls, despite having stood beneath the Tiki Tree House a dozen times since we arrived yesterday, are hopping around with the rest of the kids in excitement, anticipating the big splash. The temperature out there is 18 degrees, but in here, both the air and water are 84 degrees. I also have a view of the snow that since yesterday has been drifting gently against the windowpanes that let in plenty of natural light.
The horn has just blown to let everyone know the bucket is about to tip-which it does about four times each hour-and kids are hurrying from all corners of the indoor water park to be part of the fun. I am sitting 20 feet away from where my 7- and 9-year-old daughters are waiting under the Tiki Tree House for the bucket above to drench the waiting throngs below with a thousand gallons of warm water.