One last hurrah at Watiki Waterpark in Rapid City, South Dakota!

(…way back on April 29th!)
Our last day in Rapid City was spent doing some shopping, and then in the evening, we went to Watiki Waterpark…
Watiki is located between 2 hotels, but is open to the public. Vaughn and I had been talking about hitting a water park, and we planned on staying at a hotel so that we could go to one. Googling, I found Watiki, and also found that it costs about the same to go whether we stay in the hotel or not. Hmmm… 3 hotel rooms (at what, $90/night, each?) to save $6 in water park fees? No brainer… we just stayed in the rv (across the interstate at Cabela’s), and drove over for the evening.
Since it was off-season, the park was only open from 4 to 9 p.m., which ended up being plenty of time to wear the kids out.
We were the first ones there – even before they turned on the water…

It was a nice, clean, family-friendly park, with fastwater slides for the big kids, and a little kid’s area too…

Everyone was super excited except for Molly…

She cried and fussed for 3 hours straight (no exaggeration!). It was pretty noisy in there, so she wasn’t bothering the other swimmers; she would stop as long as she was being held and was far away from the big monkey that would dump a huge bucket full of water.

Everyone else was busy running here and there, and making sure to try out every pool/slide…

The kids’ favorites were thewater slides that you had to rideinner tubes down – there were both double and single tubes.

One of the slides had this huge funnel…

It didn’t take the kids long to figure out that the double tubes are faster…

The kids made round after round – up 3 flights of stairs (toting a tube), down the slide, across the pool, back up the stairs, down the slide…

as fast as they could, with an occasional pause to swap riders…

One of the major hits of the evening was finding out that we happened to come on ‘free hot dog’ night!WooHoo! The little girls thought that was just the greatest!!!LOL!

But it seemed to be ‘eat as fast as you can’ so that you can get back to the slides…

The little girls weren’t much interested in the slides (especially after Emma thought she was going to drown coming down one of the big ones – no, she wasn’t by herself), but they enjoyed the lazy river…

Dad is one of the biggest kids, and right in the middle of it all…

If you aren’t riding your tube just right, you can get quite adunkin’ coming out of the slide…

Taking a break from the slides, it was time for a game of hoops…

FINALLY, after 3 hours, the boss decided that maybe she would give the hot tub a chance…

and Loved It!!!

You’d think that Molly could have decided to like it a bit earlier in the evening!

We couldn’t get her out of it…

But all good things must come to an end, whether they be nights at the waterpark, or traveling the country (at least for the summer).

One partingdunkin’ from the dumping bucket…

Watiki was super fun, and boy did everyone sleep great that night…

The next morning, we hit the road for home, spending a couple of days at each of the grandparents’ homes catching up on hugs, kisses, and fudgesicles.