The Great Big Wolf Lodge

Well, it is actually just called the Great Wolf Lodge (GWL), but don't tell Ava - she calls it the Great BIG Wolf Lodge every time :)  We had the opportunity to go there with our larger Young Life Carolinas region for a conference this past week.  Young Life does it right - they have amazing camp properties and they know how to pick conference locations!

The GWL is kind of like Disney meets Carrowinds meets Wet n Wild in a woodsy/cabin setting - and it's 5 minutes from our house!!!  It is a HUGE facility and it is primarily built around a gigantic indoor water park - they keep the entire area at 84 degrees and the water is just about perfect.  And the water slides, oh the water slides - they have something for everyone ranging from a huge wave pool to a really serious slide called the Tornado.  The Tornado is a slide that you can go on with 3 other people inside a large squareish raft.  You start out nice and slow, then it goes dark, and then you see a cliff....and then you drop about 75 feet and get thrown into this crazy funnel vortex thing and you shoot up one side and down the other about 3 or 4 times - it takes your stomach away each time - it is awesome!!!    Then there is the super sized bucket of water that dumps out about every 5 minutes as bells gong, and the wave pool that is quite calm for about 8 minutes until you hear the howling of wolves - then the waves start coming - plenty big to make a raft ride quite fun.  Kids forts with water slides, a younger kids play area, and about 4 other really fun slides.  Enough to keep you busy for hours at a time.

We participated in the conference meetings during the mornings and drank up the time of worship, prayer, and teaching.  Then it was to the water park for the afternoon, dinner, evening meetings, and then late night playing (bowl game, some crazy charades game charoodles or something...).  It was a fantastic time to hang with some fellow YL committee members (what up Turners?!), spend quality time with our area leadership (Ryan and Ashley), and get to meet a bunch of the larger Carolinas area YL family.  Let's just say if we could do this every week....we would be there :)

You have to check out of your room by 11AM, but you are allowed to use the water park till 9PM on the day of check out.  So what did we do?  We woke up early, got all the kids to school, put in a full day of work, and left the kids at home with babysitters Aunt Katie and Uncle Graham, and had some adult time at GWL!!!  The Turners and Dreschers got to be big kids for a couple hours.  We rode every ride about 10 times since there were no lines, and even got quite a workout in by running most of the 4 flights of stairs to get to the top of the rides.  Then we headed to On the Border for salsa, Dos Equis and sopapillas (sp).  A very unique and very fun night.

Enjoy the video - I tried to capture the experience for those of you who have never been to/heard of the GWL.

VIDEO

 

BLOG 05 Great Wolf Lodge.wmv

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