Over the past couple of years 
This year, it was decided (by
I wrote a post several years ago about Frankenmuth. It is a small tourist town in Michigan that has fully embraced the Bavarian theme. They are famous for a couple things including their chicken dinners, being home to one of if not the largest Christmas store in the world, and my favorite, home to the oldest brewery in the state of Michigan.
It just so happens Zehnders Splash Village is right next to that Christmas store called Bronner's.
I was able to get us a one night reservation for the day after Christmas. Apparently, my wife knew something I didn't because while I was expecting it not to be very busy due to the holidays, she knew better.
It was packed! This must be what families do for the holidays, or families that don't celebrate the holidays and want to get away. I don't know.
I was shocked at how many people were there though. My social distancing alarm was going off as I knew there would be no way to maintain distance and cover out faces while swimming. I was a bit nervous.
As I said, I picked a room that gave us two beds since the kids are all still small enough to sleep together. It also provided us with five wrist bands for entry into the water park. At $400 USD it wasn't cheap for that one night stay, but when you figure it was spread across three kids, it wasn't too bad.
The cool thing is, since you can't actually check in to your room until 4:00 PM or so, they still let you have access to the park starting at noon. We found a changing room, got the kids ready, and entered the madness.
The kids played for a good couple of hours before my older nephew decided he wanted to go down the water slide. He was too nervous to go on his own, so that meant that Uncle Bozz had to step up and accompany him. Well, I am going to be honest. I have never been down a water slide that I can remember in my entire life, so this was a new experience for me as well.
You can see in the photo above where the water slides dump out.
You can also see a pair of pasty white legs sticking up in the air next to the guys head in the center. Just past the lady in the red bikini. Yep, that would be me. Totally durffing the landing. The life guard was laughing at me and she said she had never seen anyone come out quite like that.
Unfortunately, that is when things started to go down hill. The three littles played for a bit more and were basically all over the place. It was hard keeping up with them. As I was trying to keep up with them in the lazy river, I somehow got some pretty severe road rash on my foot. It was bleeding pretty bad and I knew I was likely done swimming with the littles for the day.
We got the text message that our room was ready, so I checked in, and moved our car over to the area where our room was. I also stopped and got a couple baskets of french fries for the kids to snack on.
As the kids were playing and we were busy snacking, I started to realize that people were walking in and out of these double doors a lot. To my great surprise, there was a whole other section of the park that we hadn't even discovered yet!
I took the kids over there for another couple of hours and let them play while I let
Finally,
As I was bringing in the last load of luggage, I ran into everyone heading to the room. We ordered some food and after eating we decided to hit the arcade.
I should mention that as I was walking back and forth to get the food, I noticed that everyone was out of the pool in the one section and I saw the life guards dumping jugs of chlorine into the pool. Not a great sign. Someone clearly had an accident, so it was good that the kids had picked the arcade after dinner and not swimming.
The plan was to let them swim some more in the morning before we packed up and headed home.
The arcade was kind of a bust. It was small and cramped, overpriced, and the prizes were basically cheap junk. The kids had a great time I think, but it was pretty short lived.
We headed back to the room and started to get ready to play some games and call it a night. The kids were all ready for bed when my youngest nephew got out of bed and started walking towards the bathroom.
I don't handle vomit very well, so my wife made me stay around the corner. She cleaned things up as best she could while I called housekeeping to let them know what was up. I requested new towels and a mop.
They sent a very nice young man who seemed quite unfazed by everything that was going on. It turns out he had worked in a nursing home and this was not the worst thing he had ever dealt with.
I slipped him a $20 for his trouble and thanked him.
The young patient said he was feeling better, but we put a trash can near his bed just in case. Sure enough, about an hour later, he got sick again. We called their parents and it was decided we would meet up to have them go home. It turns out their mom had suddenly gotten sick too.
We handed them off successfully and I found out later that he didn't make it from the drop off point home without throwing up again. He was right as rain the next day though.
Instead of going back to a hotel room that smelled like vomit and a smaller bed, it was decided to just go home and sleep in our own bed.
It's a bummer that we spent so much money for a room we didn't even use, but I think the kids got more than their fair share of fun and memories out of the afternoon we spent together. They played in the water park for a good five to six hours before things went south, so you can't really complain about that.
