WHOOOO WORLD'S BEST WATER PARK!
(supposedly. voted world's best. but the poll might not include the crazy vietnamese water parks that luke went to...but that's aside the point)
So, as a general summary for all you lame-os who missed out, it was really AWESOME and FUN and GAAAHHH GREAT~~ The water was really refreshing, and the day was like perfect...not too sunny, occasional clouds with lotsa shade in the schlitterbahn area. It wasn't that crowded, but still lines existed...i think if we went on a weekend, wait time coulda been from like 40 minutes to like 2 hours...but instead, it was more like 15 min to 45 min. Not too bad! it was really fun hanging with my group (my group was all chilling and really fun just to explore around schlitterbahn, plus we all kinda helped each other out with food and remembering to reapply sunscreen...multiple times)
i would be seriously psyched to go again, like this year :D I finally learned how to ride some rides and not to be so scared, and now that i'm old enough to remember ride names, i know what to hit up~
I will detail the ride names in this entry, just so I can remember for future reference, but I'll try and do a play-by-play of what we did, and how fun it was :)
So we got up really early and drove there around 8 in the morning...caravaning like 4 cars, Phil's, Rachelle's, David's, and Justin's...we got like prime parking spots outside of Schlitterbahn West (the main gate) so we didn't all buy lockers and could easily visit the cars whenever we wanted.
The 3 groups we split into:
My group: Me, Luke, Melanie, Melinda, and Justin
Rachelle's group: Rachelle, Joyce, Cindy, Phil, and another of Joyce's cousins that i didn't get the name of
Rosanna's group: Rosanna (another joyce relative) and her friends
we had exactly 15 people, and it was super awesome to get in for only $35...for like 10 hrs of fun?!
We all grabbed a tram ride to
Blastenhoff and raced for the lines that we knew were going to be the longest...up blastenhoff tower. We rode
Wolf Pack, the group raft-tube ride, and justin really rocked the boat :OO kinda scary. I'm a scaredy cat, so we'll see that throughout this entry >>; afterwards, we (melanie, melinda, luke and me) went to the wave pool (called
The Torrent) around the tower around for like 8 times, justin ended up joining us instead of trying out Master Blaster. The torrent is always a big favorite of mine, no wait, and for some reason, it's really fun to keep going around and around, especially after we started really trying to get in front of the flood gates, then getting to the edge of the curve to get the highest waves, and at the end, there's 'turbulence' where the waves start clashing, and it gets pretty fun there.
We left for the tram around 11:30, but instead of going back to West, we went into
Surfenburg to kinda see what that was about. We rode the
Dragon's Revenge and
Family Blaster, which are like calmed down versions of the Blastenhoff's Master Blaster and Wolf Pack, I feel. We passed some of the line waiting time (Dragon's revenge was surprising a long wait) by playing the animal kingdom/super hero style game. It was silly how the guys were like, my cheeks hurt from smiling, since it was so weird to be playing it, i guess for them...but that's actually always a good thing to pass the time with. Dragon's Revenge had the up and downs of master blaster, but not as steep...and the family blaster line was really short, but so was the ride :P it was good at the beginning, but then it ended, and like whuut? already? lol kinda thing. We skipped out on the other stuff (like the surfing one, and the wave krystal river) since we wanted to try other stuff.
We ate outside of our cars in a old, useless parking spot (fried rice, granola bars, and chips and salsa) at 1:00...we aren't as hardcore as the extreme team (rachelle's group) since they didn't eat until like hours later @_@ mebe at like 4, we met them and ate some of their food. We had such a good spot
i think justin overheard someone talking on the other side of the fence of how good our real estate was, heh heh
In Schlitterbahn West, we were all over the place, since i didn't really remember the rides at all @_@ but we still had fun. I guess our group objective is to stand in the least amount of lines as possible, lol. We first went on
the Double Loop, a body slide that was actually kinda fast and pretty swishy :) then we grabbed some tubes and rode
Whitewater tube chute...that one was pretty fun, probably the 2nd best tube chute, not too long, and didn't end up with much traffic (traffic, is, in a lot of tube chutes, slow moving water and people get stuck from not being able to ride the flow, or getting trapped behind a lot of people). Whitewater probably is characterized by a lot of drops in a row...but pretty short. We hopped onto
Cliffhanger, which was fun at first, but we chose the wrong path and instead of finishing the Cliffhanger by some really fast drops, we took the
Tunnel Tube Chute, which was really slow and not exciting at all (gettin thru it was like...an hour, omg) and we landed in a river all the way on the other side of the park -_- LAME. I think becase we didn't take the other route, we missed out on some rides like Der Bahn. We all agreed it was lame and later warned the extreme group not to take it at all means (lol, later they told us the lifeguard didn't let them exit the way they wanted to, so :<)
So we had to hoof alllll the way back to the front gate, but there we found
Bahnzai Pipeline, where it's an individual covered tube slide... i really liked it cuz it was very smooth and fast and swishy...the kinda speed that I like :) ---I'm definitely not a fan of the up and down, and drops that like master blaster is famous for, and the
Downhill Racer, which we rode next and I was terrified of. Downhill racer is essentially a 4 story downhill slide (like, with some level parts to slow you down some bits, but then drop you again), head first with a mat under you, and VERY scary...for me. Melanie and Melinda really liked it a lot, tho, so :T
After that, we saw the extreme team and ate some of their food, rosanna's group left (us old ppl's energy surpassed the highschoolers! like, freshmen highschoolers! so weird) BTW, those spray sunscreen are terrible to use when you need like full body spray, reapply like every 2 hrs...cuz we counted 6 uses out of a new bottle, and it was OUT. Bah! only good for mebe like a sports lesson or something.
We then went to apparent Das Lagune area, and rode the
Soda Straw...a slide similar to the Bahnzai Pipeline, fully covered slide and smooth, but a body slide. I liked that slide a lot :) I think the Bahnzai and the Soda Straw are my favorite rides. PLUS the wait time was like, 5-10 minutes only :3 our group split due to the remaining tube chute lines looked really long (it was already 5 PM, and justin, melanie, and melinda would rather not waste time to float in the river, since it was nearing optimal line time, 7 pm) so luke and me went on
Hillside tube chute...i LOVE THIS CHUTE!!
Yes, it had the longest time wait (20 min) but really was worth it. Longer than whitewater but still had a lot of slides and bumps~ the end was great~ and it's always the tube chute i remember when I was young, where they pass thru the locker room and end up in the giant pool at the end.
We then tried for the
Raging River...the line was non-existant, only the ppl walking in front of us were in front of us for the line, but it's a long tube chute, had some small slides, but really not that thrilling. Better than the tunnel chute...mebe comparable to the Cliffhanger. It took us nearly into the Tunnel Tube Chute, in which we promptly stood up at the closest exit and left. We went on the Bahnzai again for good measure~ :) before we took the tram back to Blastenhoff/Schlitterbahn East.
We rode the wave pool for a bit before we saw our old half of the group...they rode the mat slide like 2-3 times, lol, while we were separated. We went on the tower and tried out the
Black Knight, which i feel is like the faster, longer version of Bahnzai...plus, the line was only like 15 min, whereas the other lines (Master blaster and Wolf Pack) were like an hour wait @_@ we again got separated from the group, since they first wanted to see the line for master blaster since we forgot to haul up the tubes for black knight, and got in our line later. Luke and I said we would ride twice, but after we saw them go down the black knight their first time, we didn't see them...apparently they were able to get into the master blaster ride twice in the last hour, which is pretty good! luke and I just had our own fun in the wave pool afterwards :) and I was getting tired and decided I wasn't going to drive to houston that same night.
me and luke headed back to the cars w/o melanie, melinda, and justin, and waited around/rinsed off/etc for everyone to gather by the lockers. The rest of the night was actually not very fun, since I had to drive back to austin (still an hour drive, so a bit tiring)...and then we blindly searched for the 'hyatt at the arboretum'...first, we couldn't quite find the arboretum...went down braker, so that was wrong...and then got to great hills arboretum, thanks to calling melissa...but unfortunately, we drove rachelle to the Renaisaance hotel -_- oops...and so apparently, the renaissance gave us a map to get to the hyatt....which was near this *surprise* arboretum...that wasn't near the usual arboretum...about 10 min down the road, closer to loop 360...a couple of u-turns had to be made...especially when after we left rachelle at the hyatt, and *surprise* that wasn't the right hyatt.
omg.
So we went back and got her, and they gave her proper directions to the right hyatt, which was no where near the original arboretum, somewhere along the intersection of loop 1 and loop 360, and finally dropped her off.
I wasn't very happy, especially since after all that confusion, it was already a 2 hr drive, and the drive back to houston woulda taken 3 hrs only. gah.
So i get back to luke's, and there was a r*ach in the kitchen...and that was trauma, if you know how i handle those things...but then luke took good care of me, despite me being all tired and exhausted and kinda snippy with everyone. was a really nice thing he did for me, and I really, really enjoyed my vacation with him.
mmk! So that's all there was to a crazy monday of schlitterbahn :P if you bothered reading this all, props. it'll be a good guide for schlitterbahn, at least.
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