Water Parked

Newsletter 2024-12-06

A vacation planner’s job is never done.

If the only things you know about me come from this newsletter, you might think I spend all my time booking trips. That’s not entirely wrong. The older you get—and the more kids you have—the more preparation it takes to go anywhere or do anything. It’s why I started negotiations in November about spending one weekend with my brothers next July. Eight months notice is almost enough leeway to work around nap times. I’m now going through the same process for a trip with my wife and kids. All told, I’ll likely spend six months planning to spend six non-consecutive days outside my house next year. It doesn’t seem worth it. Effort seldom is, especially when it comes to parenting. Somebody should write a book about that. Nonetheless, it’s my duty as a father to occasionally take my kids to new places to complain about new things. Organizing such an outing took on new urgency after I booked that brothers-only shindig. Weighed down by more guilt than normal, I decided to set up a mid-winter trip for my family. I had made fun of my siblings with toddlers when they were unable to commit to a single weekend next summer. That’s nothing compared to the challenge of going anywhere with a high schooler.

My approach to planning the winter trip was simple enough. Every time we go on any vacation, no matter how extravagant or exotic, the only things my kids remember are the hotel and the hotel pool. Any activities beyond that are extraneous. For them, the best vacations are the ones where the hotel pool is the entire point. They still reminisce about the time we went to an indoor water park in Ohio. It was better than a similar one we visited in Indiana, where my oldest daughter, Betsy, cut her knee on the abrasive stones embedded in the concrete lining the pool. All it takes is one minor knee abrasion that gushes blood and that’s all they’ll talk about afterwards. Betsy will forever refer to that water park as the place where she almost died. Thank goodness for that lifeguard with a Band-Aid. The incident made the indoor Ohio water park, which didn’t have any child-killing rocks in the concrete, seem even better by comparison. Who knew that not disfiguring your customers would be such an effective marketing strategy?

The only problem with the indoor Ohio water park was the price. Keeping your kids alive comes at a premium. Trips there cost six to seven hundred dollars. Every time I say that, I think that astronomical sum can’t possibly be the real price, but then I go to the website and confirm that I’m right. It’s hard to believe because it’s so far beyond what’s advertised. Their emails make it seem like you and your family can have a vacation there for less than two hundred dollars, but that’s only in the middle of the week when every school-aged child is stuck in the classroom. If you pick anything on a weekend or near a break, the price triples. Add in a second night to account for travel time and you’re looking at a month’s rent for forty-eight hours in a hotel room. The indoor water park costs nearly twice as much as a day trip to a major outdoor one during the summer. In a way, that price difference is fair since a summer day trip, by definition, doesn’t involve overnight accommodations. In another, much more petty way, that’s highway robbery since the hotel stay is the worst part. Only adults see it that way. To a child, sleeping someplace with two-star amenities is a highlight for the ages.

Lately, my ten-year-old, Lucy, has been reminding me of how much fun she and her sisters had the last time we went to that indoor water park. She doesn’t mention the slides or the pool. She mainly talks about the hotel room. It featured a walled off-sleeping area painted to look like a log cabin that had one set of bunk beds and one single bed. Those of you keeping track at home might notice that’s only three beds for four kids. There was also a queen bed, reserved for my wife and me, and a pull-out couch, which offered far more sleeping space than any of the twin mattresses in the fake cabin. No matter. Kids don’t want more mattress surface area; they want fake logs painted on the walls. After much fighting, the girls settled on who would be banished to the pull-out couch: nobody. Two of them shared one of the twin beds in the faux cabin. I paid a lot of money for them to have that lack of privilege. We might not have the fanciest lifestyle, but in our house, each child at least has their own mattress.

Knowing that all my kids cared about was that fake log cabin, the first thing I did when booking this new trip was to pick a room without it.