Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Galveston Vacation Day 3

Day 3 was Schlitterbahn day! We had tickets for the waterpark so we spent our entire day there. We had our own private cabana to store our stuff so we could come and go as we pleased that even had a locker for our wallets and phones, etc. We had our own attendant who kept coming by to check and see what we needed. We could've had her go get food for us, but we brought our coolers in so we could save money and eat sandwiches all day.
We hopped into the lazy river first thing, and it turned out to be not so lazy. Schlitterbahn advertises that you literally never have to get out of the water to get all over the park because it is all connected by their lazy river system. What I failed to read is that some parts of the lazy river are actually lazy, some parts have little rapids, and other parts have huge tsunami like waves going through them. We hopped into the rapids section first without realizing it, and Kate was not pleased. She and I shared a two man tube and she also had a life jacket, but we still both ended up drenched. (I loved it, but I can imagine how scary it was for her.) We finally got out of the rapids area only to end up in the tsunami section with these huge rolling waves. Those were a bit scary as well. Finally we found the lazy section, but by the time we got to there she was done with the river. She lost her trust.
They had several kiddie areas for her to play in, so we spent lots of time watching Kate slide and play. We swam in the pool, hung out in the pool sized hot tub, and I did went down a water slide. We had to get out of the water twice for safety reasons - once due to a pretty torrential rain that came through for about 30 minutes and the second time because of nearby lightening, but we used that time to eat lunch and snacks so it wasn't a huge deal. Mom spotted this big zipline-like chair while we were in the river and decided she was riding it and one of us was going with her. Richard nor myself wanted to do it, but finally I caved and declared it was now or never.
We were strapped in to the zipline chair by Justin, who was working that day. I kept joking with him about coming to my memorial service if I didn't make it back, and he promised to speak at it for me. Richard filmed the whole thing from the bridge in front of us, and suddenly it was time to go up......and up we went. It was a great rush - actually a very smooth ride up. I am really not a fan of heights and my feet were tingly, but I wasn't too bad until we got all the way to the top and the chair stopped. When it slowed down and stopped, we sort of naturally leaned forward a tad which made us both uneasy as we were only strapped in with a simple seat belt. The view was pretty amazing from up there! Just as quickly as we stopped, we headed back down again which was great! When we got almost to the bottom, Justin leaned over in front of our rapidly approaching chair and yelled something about the emergency brake, which we couldn't understand but it made us scream anyway and then the brakes grabbed hold of us which bring you to a screeching halt! We went from screaming (Mom cursed) to laughing hysterically. Justin was bent over with laughter and declared us his favorite riders of the day and even insisted on getting a hug before we left the platform. I told him when I got down I was punching him in the face, but I hugged him instead. It was a riot. 
Since Richard wouldn't man up and ride the zipline, I told him he had to ride the boogie board surf thing instead. He acted all nervous about it and then it turned out just fine and actually quite a bit of fun. Sometimes you just have to try something you are a bit scared of and see what happens.

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