Idlewild

My friend Courtney, who I swear has all these great ideas, in the spring told me she was taking her family to this park called Idlewild, well when she got back I asked her how she liked it. She said her kids loved it and it was the perfect park for little kids and since our kids are almost the same age with the exceptions of child number three, her kids are 8, 5, 3 and 1, they are similar in age and should enjoy the experience. So I looked in to the park, since Michael and I had been discussing taking our family, just the 6 of us (that still sounds funny to me) on a mini family vacation. Well we've done Busch Garden's before (a little pricey and a lot of big rides), Kings Dominion is kind of the same thing only closer, nice but really not aimed at small children, so we thought we would look into Idlewild. I hear it's a lot like Dutch Wonderland, but also has a waterpark inside of it, so you can do both a regular amusement park and a waterpark. Well never having been to any of these places we decided to try one and it turned out to be a great park. We were very lucky with the weather, it was cloudy on Sunday when we got there and it rained once while we were in the park, but Monday and Tuesday were gorgeous, warm with out being excessively hot. The park itself is very reasonable and we got a deal through our hotel that included 4 tickets with our stay and you could purchase 2nd day tickets at half price. So it was economical. The hotel we stayed at, lets face it we need a suite big enough to hold us all, overlooked a golf course, it was really nice. The park itself was really clean, the kids could ride almost all of the rides, you had to be at least 36" for almost all of the rides, with the exceptions of a handful like the Wild Mouse and the Roller Coaster, which my kids don't like anyway, so it worked out really well for us. Even Jaden could do a couple of things, especially the Story Book Land which is exactly like it sounds, a park where story books come to life basically.

This was the view from our hotel room in the morning, the fog between the mountains over looking the golf course was beautiful.

They had a lot of these cardboard cut out through out the park, especially in story book land.

This was one of the bigger rides, it was a balloon ride, but it got pretty high, Kaleigh actually did not like it, but Jordan and Madison loved it and wanted to do it again the next day.
This was a part of the park called the Jumpin Jungle it was great for them to climb around in.Yes that would be me on the Tarzan slide (it's really a zip line).
Water raft races.
They saw ball pit full of fun, I saw germ pit, I kind of had to leave my phobias behind for that one.
They had a concert in the evening that the kids loved, and we caught on the way out.

Madison was the only one who would ride the Ferris Wheel with me, everyone else was too scared.

The entrance to story book land, even Jaden got to enjoy some of the park

Flying Aces, I was surprised Jordan actually wanted to ride this ride, she is not good with heights but she loved it when she rode it with me. However, she did not like it when she rode it the next day with Michael.

Hold on to Daddy's hat.