When you live in Wisconsin, the Dells is pretty much a staple to your life. As a kid, my family took trips to the Dells every year. My dad is a bit of a water park junkie so it was often something we did multiple times a year. We always did the Noah’s Ark trip in the summer and a Wilderness trip in the winter. As soon as I had Noah I knew it would be an annual tradition that we would continue.
BUT, there has been one very important issue that has prevented us from visiting the Dells…I have a horrible, irrational fear of Noah being in the water. Not a minor fear. A very bad fear. And because of my fear, he naturally can sense that and has had a little bit of a fear himself. He really doesn’t know how to hold his breathe and keep his mouth closed.
Which brings me to my second BUT…we started taking swimming lessons at Goldfish Swim School earlier this summer and Noah is excelling tremendously! (I promise, more on that later. I’ll share all of my love for Goldfish in a blog post very soon.)
So, we decided it was time thats we could take a trip to the Dells. And, naturally, we chose to go to the Wilderness Resort. That was always the resort that we went to when I was a kid. Well, turns out, it hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. Everything is pretty much exactly the same.
If you’re not familiar with the Wilderness Resort, it is a waterpark resort in Wisconsin Dells that is a hotel and golf resort that features 444 guest rooms, 40 vacation villas, 76 condos and 35 cabins. It is also home to Wilderness on the Lake which features 108 luxurious two and three bedroom condominium units overlooking Lake Delton; and Glacier Canyon Lodge, which features 460 upscale condominium units. Combined, the three properties offer four indoor and four outdoor waterparks that total nearly 500,000 square feet of extreme water fun!
We stayed in the main hotel for our trip because it was just us and the condos are a little too big for one family. They are amazing if you are going with another family and need more space. The condos give you separate bedrooms and full kitchen – which is pretty much essential when you’re doing the hotel thing with kids.
We were lucky and our room ended up being pretty much dead center in the hotel. There are three different waterparks in the main hotel – one on each side and one in the middle. With our room being in the middle of the hotel, it was pretty easy for us to get to all three water park areas. It was pretty awesome.
I was pleasantly surprised that all three water areas were pretty kid friendly.
Klondike Kavern (above) is located in the center of the hotel and is the most kid-friendly. This is the area where you’ll find the indoor/outdoor pool that is open year-round, the lazy river and a big play area for the little kids. It also has some fun tube and body slides for adults.
The Wild West area (above) is located in the center of the hotel and is the most kid-friendly. It had a huge kid play area with smaller kid-friendly water slides. It also had tons of splashers and water toys. There are also a couple large tube and body slides for adults. One of the big slides is a big family tube – Noah even went down one! This area was (by far) our favorite! Oh, it also has a big bumper boats area. We tried them but didn’t think they were all that fun.
The third water area in the main hotel is the Wild Water Dome (above). This area is pretty much just the giant wave pool. There is a tiny kid play area with splashers, but it’s really small. The wave pool is lots of fun for big kids or adults but Noah really wasn’t ready for it. We were only in this area for about 15 minutes of the weekend.
The resort also has a huge outdoor water park area but it’s only open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It looked pretty cool so we were a little bummed it was closed. Although, going in early September also had a huge bonus in that the resort was pretty much dead. It wasn’t crowded at all, which was amazing! I think I’d take the lack of crowd over the outdoor water parks.
The other fun area at the resort was the arcade. Chris and Noah had a blast playing all of the different arcade games. I was pleasantly surprised that the arcade was pretty cheap overall. We put $20 on a game card and it lasted us the entire weekend. Major win.
Finally, the highlight of the arcade area was the go karts! Noah was SO excited to ride the go karts. We did it a couple times and had a blast!
We had a ton of fun during our stay at the Wilderness Resort. We’ll definitely be back again soon.