Summer is time for the family road trip! Follow Kids Activities Blog and Julie Blair and her family as they travel 8 states in 30 days for the ultimate road trip story ¦
There will be a time on your road trip in which anarchy will prevail.
Your conversations will become annoying. The car games will seem silly. The tablets, iShuffles and cell phones will have run out of batteries.
And the kids will demand you stop the stupid car.
For us, that happened for the first first time on Day 8 of our 30-day road trip.
Nobody was happy, including me, despite bucolic scenery that included winding mountain roads, Christmas-card pines and skies filled with marshmallow clouds.
I was trying to push on to Pueblo, Colorado, after four hours in the car.
There was, I reminded everyone, absolutely nowhere to pull over.
Not even a shoulder.
And just as my preschooler began to sob, out of nowhere rose Crayola-colored plastic on the skyline.
Good Lord, was that an aqua-blue swimming pool ahead? Twirly slides? Rafts?
All at once, the kids yelled, “Stop!”
So I did.
At
Walsenburg Wild Waters.
The water park features not only the aforementioned twirly slides but also a lazy river, toddler fountains and a diving pool.
There were clean bathrooms.
And fluffy, commemorative beach towels of which we now own three.
We charmed the locals, too.
“Do the Texas voice,” asked our new 7-year-old friend Minnie, eyeing my cowboy hat.
I “ya’ll-ed” and they all “ooh-ed” and “ahh-ed.”
(I saw no reason to tell such nice people that I’m an ex-pat from Michigan living in Dallas. Why ruin it?)
Then, if you can believe this, I gave them the hook ’em horns sign. (Thanks for teaching me, Matt and Christina Soderberg!)
Well, the crowd went absolutely wild.
We zipped forth on the slides, honored guests, until Charlotte turned blue with cold.
(She is, after all, our family’s true Texan. While she can play outside all day in triple digits, asking her to swim in 70-degree water on an 82-degree day for a sustained amount of time
was a big request.)
To find Walsenburg, you’ll have to really peek between the pines.
It’s somewhere North of Taos, New Mexico, and South of Denver.
Just keep your eyes open for the Crayola-colored slides.
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