Day 8 (last day) (3/21/2015) - Aquatica
Today was the last day of our vacation. I am actually writing this on our flight home. JetBlue’s free Wi-Fi works quite well.
We all got to sleep in this morning so that was a nice treat. We checked out of the Caribe Royale. I highly recommend this resort. It is so surprising to me that you can get a large 2 bedroom villa for around $200 a night during spring break.
We arrived at the Aquatica parking lot around 9:45 a.m. in advance of a 10:00 a.m. opening. The traffic backed up onto I-Drive. The non-Discovery Cove SeaWorld parks seem to have issues with their parking lots. They do not open early enough and then they are understaffed. Today was a 90F Saturday during spring break and they did not have the park fully staffed. They had one person taking parking fees ($13/car) from two lanes. They also had the same person collecting zip codes. It took us 15 minutes to get to our parking space.
From there getting into the parks was easy. Compared to Wet’n Wild the landscaping is very nice and comparable to the Disney water parks. We found two nice chairs in the shade and immediately started going on slides.
We rode Whanau Way and Omaka Rocka. Those were both really fun. We then went over to Ihu’s Breakaway Falls. We did the purple line without the “breakaway” box. The initial drop was still basically straight down so that was exciting enough for us. This was a ride that was understaffed. They had one guy working four slides.
After this we went to Taumata Racer. This is also really fun and has a steep drop at the end. It is very slippery when you are exiting. I found that out the hard way and will have an enormous bruise on my knee.
Next we rode HooRoo Run. This was probably the tamest ride all day. After this we rode Wallhalla Wave. This was the first ride we encountered with a wait. It was about 20 minutes. It was really fun.
I wanted to see the dolphin training show at noon so I got an early lunch while DH and DDs 11 and 8 rode the Dolphin Plunge. I also waited in a relatively long line to rent small, scratchy, thin towels for $4 each. The rental towels at Wet’n Wild were vastly superior. We missed most of the dolphin training exhibition that did not seem that impressive. It was interesting to see these dolphins however. They were much smaller than the Discovery Cove dolphins and were black and white.
After that we went to Roa’s Rapids. This looks like a lazy river but it is not. There are no tubes. Life jackets are available or you can just swim. The water is quite warm and very fast moving. There are some rapids in sections. You are pushed along very fast by the water. You move faster on the sides where jets push you along. We all thought it was great. We went around about 7 times. Since we had a plane to catch we did one final slide around 1:00 p.m. We chose Omaka Rocka.
They have shower facilities that are OK but not great.
By this point the park was massively crowded. The park did not seem prepared for all of these people. When we left at 1:30 p.m. there were huge lines waiting to buy tickets. It seemed like every parking space was full.
I was very glad that we arrived at park opening since we were able to do everything that we wanted to do by noon. I doubt the people arriving in the afternoon had anywhere near as much fun as we did.
It only took about 15 minutes to get to the airport from there. The security line was much better organized this year. We cleared that line in about 10 minutes. Last year it took over an hour. We had time to get a sit down snack and have had a generally good flight. We are about to land in NYC so it is time to sign off.
It was an awesome vacation!!!