Thanksgiving 2022: "Autumn at the Water Park in Arizona"

December marches on and the trip to Arizona feels like it was months ago. In reality it was only weeks, but here we are.

We visited my mother in Phoenix for Wednesday through Saturday, and stopped by my 95 year old Grandma Lorraine's before starting the drive back to the Southland. We've been making the drive on and off for Thanksgiving since moving back to California and changing jobs, which makes time off more plausible.

In that time, my mother has been putting us up in a hotel; her and her partner's place is small (but still bigger than our apartment), and would be cramped for us and the kids. This year, she changed her normal hotel choice and went with the Great Wolf Lodge.

Up until this past summer, I was wholly unfamiliar with the Great Wolf organization. One of Cass's friend's mom sent out the feelers about a possible birthday party at one of the locations. Corrie looked it up online and thought, "We're not going to rural Minnesota for a kid's party."

It turns out there are quite a few Great Wolf Lodges around the nation. The first is in the Dells, in Wisconsin; another near Duluth; and then they begin sprouting up all over, even one in Garden Grove (in Orange County and Anaheim-adjacent) and one in Phoenix.

The kicker for this place, the main attraction, is that it's an indoor water park attached to a grand hotel. Activities and attractions abound inside. Mini-golf, rock-wall climbing, mirror mazes, kiddie bowling, eateries of all kinds, and even magic-wand fueled "game" that had kids running all around pointing plastic sticks that lit up at all manner of things.

Those games and attractions were in the space between the "enormous hotel" part and the "enclosed water-park" part of the place; think the Overlook from the shining with a warehouse stitched on to the backside.

The waterpark was very nice. It was never too hot, never too cold, you never got sunburned or otherwise savaged by the sun, they sold food and alcohol, there was a wave-pool never more than five feet deep at the deepest point, and all sorts of waterslides and water-play zones for the littlest kiddos. Cass was tall enough for every single option, and did everything at least once.

Some stuff he could do solo (some stuff was solo by nature), some stuff he and I did together, some stuff he and Corrie did together, some stuff the three of us did together, and there was even a slide (with a big tube) that we all did as a family with Camille. 

Camille even slept for nearly an hour in my mom's arms, a rare form of cherished snuggle time.

Thanksgiving came and went, I over-brined the turkey and then just over did it, and my potato experiment didn't go as I had planned, but overall the trip was very nice.

I don't have all that many pictures, because I mostly left my phone as far from the water as I could.

Kids playing with Grandma

Here's to seeing my mom again in a few weeks. The "Holiday Season" takes on new meaning with little tiny human roommates.