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Sink? Or Swim? (continued) The signature attraction, a speed slide with your tube continuing right into
the water, with clear tubes showing you Commerson's dolphins all around you,
disappoints almost completely. You can't see anything!
Just as bad, the thrilling artwork showing a lazy river navigating apparent
caves with tubes of fish almost surrounding you turns out to be downright
misleading (the only fish exhibit is a single wall in a non-cave).
I need to stop seeing "the
best possible
outcome" when I look at concept art.
The park boasts that it has 36 slides, which sounds eye-popping and amazing,
and all around too good to be true. Well, in fact it is too good to be true.
That number includes all the children's slides, which are rather numerous. There
are only 18 "adult-sized" rides. And that number counts each slide individually,
even if one style of ride is duplicated on the same tower to provide additional
throughput. That happens on almost all the towers, and one of the towers has a
full eight identical slides (it's a racer), so you're really only looking at
seven different kinds of adult-sized slides. Seven is a lot less impressive than
36. At the uncrowded start of the day, I tore through six of those adult slides
in just an hour, though I imagine a crowded day would take most of the afternoon
to hit everything.
The view from the racer. Don't worry! I didn't
endanger my SLR.
I splurged on a disposable water camera for the occasion.
But we can't in fairness dwell only on the negatives. The park has enormous
advantages and a great many things are done right. A couple of non-slide
attractions in particular surprised and delighted our family (more on this
later), and the reality is that 95% of everything we tried or saw was
well-imagined, excellently designed, efficiently created, and perfectly
serviced.
Children who are 42 inches tall can go on most slides, and those who are 48
inches tall can get on everything. If your family has children tall enough for
all the rides (or at least enough of them), it may well be that you'll find
Aquatica very much worth your time. There will doubtless be families who think
Aquatica is the best water park ever, in fact. It all depends on what you're
looking for. If you find the Disney theme concept over-cooked, Aquatica may meet
your needs better. It's a pleasant environment without trying to be a
simulation. If you like some thrill rides but rue the impossible lines and
overcrowding at other water parks (like Wet and Wild), Aquatica may be perfect
for you instead.
Clean, fresh, and not too over-crowded.
Overall, the park scores a B+ with our family. My wife would have said an A-,
and I leaned toward a straight B (I like my themed atmospheres to be specific,
what can I say?), so the B+ marks a nice compromise. To fully explain our
grades, we'll have to look at the specifics of our visit.
The park was to open at 10:00, and we figured we'd arrive at 9:30 to stake a
spot. Good thing we did, since the place was crowded already. I should have
known that locals were not fooled by the cold morning and gray skies, and would
know to come early. The line to get into the parking lot was a little bad, and
the line of people to get into the gate was a little worse. It got a lot worse
as the morning wore on.
Apparently folks got to the front and realized the long line was for the
giveaway t-shirt ("I was the first to swim, slide, and ride Aquatica") rather
than the bag check or the turnstiles themselves. At the start of the day (well,
technically 10:05 since the park opened five minutes late), this wasn't an
issue, but later people could have skipped the long line to go up to the empty
turnstiles. Though I imagine too much of that would have led to chaos. I imagine
the park managers were taken a little by surprise on this count.
Once more unto the breach, and with a full
parking lot in the background, too!
We were taken by surprise, as well, by something different. We got stopped at
the bag check on the way in and informed that we couldn't take in the two
bananas we had in our bag (remember, we have a 14-month old, and these happen to
be his favorite fruit). I was a combination of miffed and elated. Miffed because
this kind of snack poses no problem at other parks, but elated in that we seem
to have found a park that will actually enforce its rules about no outside food.
I've long thought the parks should enforce this kind of rule. I was glad to run
back to the car with the food.
Safety first!
Check that. I wasn't too happy on the other hand (third hand?) because I was
also being sent back with our baby's inflatable raft that we take to the Disney
water parks, for use on the lazy river. It's designed for a small kid, unlike
the standard Disney ones, so we figured it would be useful here. It would have
been OK with me to be told to not use it, or even to deflate it, but to send me
away with the thing was a bit much. It turned out later that the lazy rivers
(yes, there are two of them) wouldn't have been good places for this kind of
raft after all, but I would have been OK with simply leaving the raft with our
towels and stroller at a chair somewhere.
And check my happiness about the "outside food" policy a further step. Upon
my (re)entry after returning to the car, I asked and was told small food items
was OK, and this time the person checking (it was a different person) said that
bananas were no big deal. I'm guessing this is one of those kinks in training to
work out that every new park goes through, so I'm not overly steamed about it.
They'll get it right, one way or another.
It was a bit of an ongoing theme, actually, that we kept encountering
employees who didn't know the rules or had conflicting ideas. One worker in
Kookaburra Cove had no idea if the kid slides were meant for children only, or
if adults could take an infant with them. One worker on the slower lazy river
told me a vest would be required when I went to the faster river, but this
turned out to be incorrect.
Since we're on the subject of the lazy rivers, let's dwell here to explain
the difference. Loggerhead Lane is a slow-moving lazy river in the usual sense
of the word. It circles Tassie's Twisters, the "toilet bowl" type raft slides,
and oddly, you have to actually wade across the lazy river to even get in line
for Tassie's Twisters. I kind of liked that quirk.
Tassie's Twisters, as seen from a different
tower.
Loggerhead Lane is also home to the single wall of fish display, as well as
an underwater look at the Commerson's dolphins.
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