On the web site for Water World, you could rent a cabana for the day. The cabana has a table and chairs, free wi-fi internet if you have a laptop, a cooler with ice and two sun chairs.
Laura insisted, for her sanity since she hates crowds, that we rent one. For an extra 99 dollars, you could also get the deluxe cabana purchase, which included 5 rental tubes, a fan, some meals, 10 drinks and various other things. I crunched the numbers and opted not to get the deluxe cabana since you are allowed to bring your own drinks in as long as they are sealed, so that was covered. I then checked the prices of the food stands next to the cabanas and they weren't that expensive either.
When we got there, we were met at our cabana by 'Bill' and 'Ted', our cabana boys. 'Bill' was our main cabana boy, but 'Ted' was tagging along until 2 in the afternoon. It was immediately funny to us that they both looked like unshaven stoners, which was quite the contrast from the rest of the staff, which were shaven at least.
'Bill' told us the basics of the cabana, which wasn't much, and handed us a "menu" of five items.
He said in a stoner droll, "You can order these off the menu, and I'll bring them to you. Or... you can just walk over there (points at the food stands across the way) and get it yourself for a lot cheaper."
We opted to walk across and get it ourselves.
Laura spent some time sunning herself and reading while Julia and I did some rides and reported that she was quite entertained by 'Bill' and 'Ted' walking by periodically to check on the cabanas.
The first slide we went on was just up the hill from us. It was a pretty conventional slide that was fairly tall with several hills. I went down first. I was moving so fast by the time I hit the home stretch toward the bottom that I was literally afraid I wasn't going to slow down in time before I ran out of room at the end. Thankfully, it did.
I got up to watch Julia's plummet and kind of laughing to myself about it. She was NOT going to like this.
She slid down. I could tell that she was trying to slow down because she had her legs spread wide. She got to the bottom, got up and said, "I am never going on that again! It's so scary!"
So for the rest of the day, Julia, Laura and I settled for rides that were fairly benign. Usually, they involved getting a small inner tube and going down a fairly speedy twisting and turning water track. We went on those quite a few times.
The first time we went on a tube ride like that, we didn't know which way to start from. We thought we saw where to go, but when we got to where the ride started, we saw no inner tubes. Instead, we saw a kid standing under a sun shade guarding some red inner tubes. We didn't see any other people walking toward the ride with red tubes. They were carrying tan inner tubes.
I asked the girl there, "What are these tubes for?"
"These are our valet inner tubes. You get a wrist band when you buy the valet service and you don't have to carry a tube up the hill."
"How much does that cost?" I asked.
"22 dollars."
Ouch.
Most people looked like they opted to save the money and just carry up the inner tubes.
This wasn't as easy as it looked.
We walked back down to the start of the line, if there was one, and picked up an inner tube. It was fairly heavy. I consider myself decently strong, and yet I was having a hard time carrying these things up the hills. A lot of the time, it was just me and Julia. Considering Julia is only 8 years old, I didn't get a lot of help out of her. I started to sing slavery songs as I was carrying the tubes up the hills to get to the top of the ride.
I started to think that they were wasting some good free labor at Water World. They could stop people who were walking up the hill anyway and make they carry something else up to the top.
By the end of the day, I thought my calves were going to fall off. For days, the very act of walking became an ordeal. I thought I was going to scream every time I stood up.
Julia really enjoyed Water World. She especially liked a ride called "Lost River of the Pharoahs", which was a multi-person raft ride in the dark with all sorts of ancient Egyptian-like effects and decorations. We also liked one called "Voyage to the Center of the Earth" which has the story of a construction crew accidentally poking a hole in a big warp in the Earth's crust that leads to dinosaurs. It had some decent thrills, especially when the strobe lights hit and I couldn't tell which way we were sliding.
One of the things we tried was "The Wave" which was a dual 30 mile per hour wave pool that simulated surfing on a body board. I saw some people trying it and it didn't look that hard to me.
You take one of the body boards and you kind of fall into the wave from the top. You can either enter on your stomach or you can enter on your knees. I chose to enter on my knees. The next thing I knew, I had flipped over and was thrown around the wave to the end. I felt like my body had been twisted in several different directions.
I got up, pulled the wedgie out of my bottom and looked up to see Laura laughing her head off at me. Even Julia was laughing at me.
I decided though, that I wanted to try it again. I walked back with the body board to the top of the wave and the life guard said to me, "This time, I think you're going to want to lay on your stomach."
"Thanks," I muttered.
I managed to get through this try without wiping out.
Later, Julia said that she wanted to try it. She was pretty nervous trying it out. A few of the surfers who had basically camped out there all day were giving her tips. One man was telling her to hold onto the sides tight. Some teenage girls near the ride were yelling encouragements of "You go girl!" and "You can do it!"
Julia fell into the wave on her stomach and managed to get ride the wave without wiping out.
The teenage girls cheered for her. Julia was excited that not only had she made it without wiping out, but she also loved that the girls cheered for her.
Before we left that day, we all applied sun screen. I had urged everyone to put it on every 90 minutes or so, which Julia and I did. Laura, on the other hand, refused because she wanted to get some sun.
I tried to reason with her because we go through this all the time. Laura has very fair skin, and it doesn't take much sun for her to turn from shiny whiteness to shiny redness befitting a boiled lobster.
When she refused to put on the sunscreen, I said, "Here's how this is going to end. 'I hurrrrt! Owww! Rub some Aloe on me!'"
I mimicked Laura every time she gets too burned. It looks bad when she finally gets out of the sun and then it starts to get worse and worse as it reddens even more and then gets blisters on part of the skin, which I'm sure is very healthy for her.
When we left Water World, it was with this same problem. We got back to the hotel and Laura felt sick. It was as if she had a fever. She had the chills, but at the same time felt hot and begged me not to turn off the air conditioner.
I kept saying to her, "Gee, who was it that was predicting this was going to happen? Oh yeah, it was me!"
"Shut up!" she moaned.
I didn't escape unscathed, either. I had some mysterious rashes in several private places. There were the two long red rash streaks on my inner thighs from all the walking. Also, there were squared shaped scabs from where my mesh-lined shorts had constricted. It looked like I had been punched in the trunk by someone I was so bruised. To top it off, my back was burned. I didn't think I was burned because of my front, but when I took a shower, I felt the burn.
The day ended on kind of sad note, though. A man drowned in the large wave pool that Julia and I had swam in several times that day, which was right in front of the cabana area.
I had walked over to the locker room at 5:30 to change close before the park closed at 6 pm. As I walked out of the locker room, there were medical personnel running around and lifeguards were ushering people away from the wave pool area. I walked around the area to get back to the cabana and noticed that there were people huddled around the other side of the pool from our cabana. Laura informed me that while I was in the locker room, the lifeguards had pulled a man out of the water. She said the man's face was gray and when they turned him on his side, water and foam oozed out of his mouth. They performed CPR on him for a long while before the ambulance took him away. We found out a few days later in the paper and on several Colorado news web sites that the man had died.
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