Our Great Wolf Lodge opened a couple of years ago. Nice to see the Northwest getting some of the cool things we usually only hear about/read about in other parts of the US We had been planning to go for awhile. We were going to take the kids for our anniversary but that never came to pass. David made reservations a couple of weeks ago and we surprised the kids with a trip up there on Thursday (we had no school on Friday!). The kids didn’t know where we were going until we pulled into the parking lot. The waterpark is very visible from I-5, but they were so oblivious to the outside world, all “plugged in” to their DSI’s and such. They had been begging us to tell them the first 30 minutes of the drive, but they eventually gave up! I have learned a lesson in this…. I will not tell the kids about a surprise until we are arriving at our destination. We had told the kids a week or so prior to going up there and I swear I never heard the end of it… “please just one hint, Mommy”. No! LOL.

The kids all screamed and were super excited as we pulled into the parking lot and they saw the giant sign that said Great Wolf Lodge all sparkly and pretty. They had seen commercials for this place. We’d driven by it many times. So, they were well aware of this place!

If you are planning a trip here and want to be as thrifty as possible, I suggest the following things:

Bring your own food, water, snacks, etc. It isn’t cheap to eat at this place. They have an expensive Dinner/Lunch/Breakfast buffet. Breakfast was $13.95 for adults (10 and up) and $8.95 for kids (9 and under). Dinner was something like $17.95 for adults and $13.95 for kids. not cheap They have a Pizza Hut Express, where can get a medium, 8 slice, pizza for $11.95. 3 Breadsticks for $3.95. This seemed to be a popular option for alot of people. This is what we chose for our lunch on Friday. Individual sodas are $2.95, so we opted for a 2 liter from PH that was $3.95 and we got 6 cups. That worked perfectly and we saved $15! You can’t take your own food into the waterpark area, but you can eat in the lodge, or right outside the door at tables with your own snacks. That is what we did. We also had a microwave and fridge in our room, so we had snacks, microwave popcorn, etc. for when we were done swimming on Thursday night.

Go during the week if you can, it’s cheaper! Look for discount codes before making reservations. We used a 20% off code we found. Sign up for their newsletter and get email specials! This is for the Grand Mound location. If you are elsewhere, change your location.

If you do Magiquest, it will add to your bill. One idea we had was to purchase the game for our whole family. It is $25 per game ($14.99 for the wand and $9.99 for the game), we could have shared the experience and saved ourselves $75. We didn’t do the Magiquest, but we watched others do it. It looked like fun. It was just not in the budget this time around.

Splurge and book the Kids Cabin or even bigger! The girls each had their own bed and it was separate from the main part of the room… they had their own TV and everything. It was very cool!

And… pictures!

Here’s a short video tour from youtube. This isn’t our video (because we are lame and forgot ours!), but you can see the inside of the park