2:29 p.m. - 2006-02-24
giraffes? GIRAFFES!!
What could be more enjoyable than a visit to the water park? After all, it involves sliding. Everybody likes to slide. Plus: water. Who can live without water? No one I know, that's for sure.
So, it was with some excitement that we drove to the water park/resort called the Kalahari in the Dells where we had decided to spend the night when Kia had a couple of days off work early this week. I'd never been to a water park or spent a whole solid day in the Dells, so it felt as though new worlds full of wondrous horizons were opening up to me. Since it was in the Dells, we expected the water park/resort to be schlocky. Since our visit was during the off season, we had hopes that it would be not crowded.
Pulling into the massive parking lot bursting with mini-vans, each of which had expelled a gaggle of loud, grubby children hours earlier, it became evident that, off-season or no, there would be crowds. Carrying our bag to the check-in, we held out hope that it would at least prove schlocky. Was it schlocky? You be the judge: The entire indoor resort is done up in an African motif, with pieces of thatch or stretched animal skin or pictures of giraffes or plastic rain-forest-mud-looking stuff covering every surface. This in a giant, boxy structure in the middle of Wisconsin, a stone's throw from the interstate. Actually, I've never been to the real Kalahari desert region, so I don't know for certain that it's not full of water parks and divided highways. But I suspect that the resort Kalahari is more typical of the Dells than of anywhere in Africa or the rest of the world.
We checked out our hotel room. This is the most exciting part about travelling, the anticipation of seeing the room for the first time. Will it be roomy? What will the lamps look like? Any appliances? Mini-bar? Will it have a loud hotel heater/AC thing stuck in the wall under the window that looks out onto the parking lot? How many cable channels, which ones, and why? Our room seemed comfortable, with all the expected amenities: a tiny coffee maker with little bags of bad coffee and powdered creamer, a little fridge, a blow dryer stuck to the wall, a tv, two queen-size beds. Aside from the little soaps that had fun facts about zebras on them and the ugly faux-thatch crap on the walls above the bed, we could have been anywhere. The thing I like best about hotel/motel rooms is the sense of instant anonymity they confer. All of a sudden you're not Joe the CPA who lives in a condo, or Sally the spinster state worker who lives with her mother; you're nobody in the middle of nowhere, you've torn off the shackles of your dreary life and you can begin anew. You could be going somewhere or nowhere, but the important thing is, you're not where you were. It's liberating in an alienating way. Or alienating in a liberating way. Whatever.
After enjoying a glass of wine in our room, we decided to quell our euphoria by having a look around the resort. This entailed a lot of walking. Our room was in a distant part of the resort, a building seperate from the main water park structure but joined to it by a long skywalk that soared majestically above the giant parking lot of the Kalahari. Our room was a little less expensive due to this fact. Americans don't like to walk, even less so when they're on vacation. Walking through the long corridor, we noted the advertisements and bits of half-assed Africana festooning the walls. They seemed to go on for miles. Animal skin in a frame. Hunk of pottery in a case. Picture of hippo. Advert for children's activity. More skin in a frame. Thatch. Thatch. Thatch. Advert: eat in the Big Kuhuna Room. This last one stopped us in our tracks.
"Oh my GOD!" one of us excaimed.
"I know!" replied the other. "We are SO going to the Big Kuhuna Room!"
"I'm gonna get the Barrel O' Monkey Fries!"
"I'M gonna get the Rhino-sized Funburger!"
"Will we be waited on by monkey waiters?"
"Isn't 'kuhuna' a Hawaiian thing, not an African thing?"
We kept going. More thatch, more pottery, down some stairs, past the convention rooms, past the hair salon. Now we were in the main building and we started to see people in bigger and bigger numbers. They mostly looked pretty unhappy. "Wow, these people seem pretty unhappy," I said to Kia. She voiced her agreement. Most of them were families with small children, the children either overstimulated and running amok or cranky and tired, the parents harried, exhausted, no doubt re-evaluating the choices they've made.
Finally we came to the main lobby, a sort of atrium with a fountain with metal animals bathing, lots of plants, gift stores, a bar with a giant screen showing FOX news, and the entrance to the water park. We picked around in one of the gift stores, noting how the t-shirts on sale were somehow lacking ribald slogans, then decided to head back to our room. There was something about this resort, something soul-crushing that we couldn't quite put our finger on. We decided to have a little more wine, then venture into the water park.
Two things struck me about the water park. First, it was very very hot inside, which was surprising given that it's an open building with a uniformly high roof, maybe four or five stories. Second, there was nothing as uncomplicated as a plain swimming pool. Everthing involved tubes and water directed through relatively narrow streams and small shallow pools the function of which were to stop the people once they were expelled from the tubes, so they wouldn't just slam into, say, concrete. The whole building seemed taken up by functional apparatus, such that it seemed a little more like a factory than somewhere to have a fun time.
My plan was to avoid the slides with the completely enclosed tubes, remembering that one episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets stuck in the water park tube due to his large bottom and becomes a pariah. Instead, we first tried an open-tube raft slide that we could ride together. It was pretty fun, but lasted only a few seconds. Then we had to find a new activity. Kia suggested we float on innertubes along the gentle current of the innertube stream. This would have provided a pleasant couple of minutes had the stream not been packed full of small children whom one had to be careful about not crashing into at every turn. Then, we climbed another set of stairs to try another slide, which turned out to be enclosed, and pitch dark inside, so it was more disorienting than anything else, but again only lasted a few seconds. By now we were experiencing diminishing returns, but decided to try one more slide, the one with the highest platform and the longest line. We waited in line on the wooden stairs (which by the way, should water park stairs be made of wood?) for around ten minutes, which wouldn't have been so bad except we were surrounded by fifteen year olds who were eager to get on the slide an had a way of CROWDING you. Finally we made it down the slide and decided to call it quits on the water park.
Back in the safety of our room and more wine, we disseminated the experience. Water parks suck, we decided. The simple swimming pools of our youth were much better because they provided freedom of movement (even, dare I say, exercize) and a blank slate upon which you could exercise your young imagination. You could come up with fun pool games, rather than just being passively run through a tube. You could interact with other people in the pool, rather than people turning into just obctacles you have to strive to avoid. We began to think maybe we were unlocking the secret of the resort misery. Even if people don't realize it, for the most part they want to be engaged, to think and be involved in their environment and people around them. Water park/resorts take that all away and for the most part try to turn people toward passivity. Us resort goers are there to pay our money, do what we're told and then go home believing we've had a good time, then wondering why we feel worse AFTER vacation than before. The best way I can think to illustrate this is to focus on the water park slide tubes themselves. They can't help but remind one of the Organs of Digestion. Guess what the food is?
Food? Did someone say BIG KUHUNA ROOM?
Because even after the water park we were still teeming with morbid curiosity. The Big Kuhuna Room squelched it once and for all. I can't even describe it. We got a table looked over the menus and knew we couldn't go through with it. We put the menus down and SLOWLY backed away from the Big Kuhuna Room. Back in the safety of our room, Kia had a revelation. She'd left her purse at our Big Kuhuna Room table. She would have to go back. While she went to retrieve it, I poured another glass of wine and read one of the hotel bathroom soaps. DID YOU KNOW that giraffes are the world's TALLEST animals?
