The first moments inside a water park complex almost always jar your senses. A rush of moist, chlorine-scented air fills your nose. Bright, cartoon colors, not to mention characters, surround you. And then there is the continuous loop of pop tunes vying with an endless whir of water — splashing, spraying, gurgling, rushing, dumping. On this last point, a caution to the uninitiated: if a bell or gong sounds, it is worth glancing up since it is likely to be a warning that some enormous vat of water overhead is preparing to dump its contents, and everyone but you knows it.
Water parks have long been a regular part of the landscape, but their enclosed iteration has become increasingly popular, and no region has embraced them like the Upper Midwest. Indoor parks — or combination indoor/outdoor parks — in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota have become standard getaways year-round. They are particularly popular in summer, when the weather can range from unforgiving heat and humidity to sporadic thunderstorms, sometimes all in the same afternoon.
"Around here, the iffy weather can happen even in the summer season, but this means that it doesn't have to ruin your vacation," said Joe Eck, a general manager of Wilderness Territory, which with its four indoor and four outdoor parks, proclaims itself the nation's largest indoor and outdoor water park and is situated in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., a city that proclaims itself the Waterpark Capital of the World. (Water parks, no doubt, are part of an industry of superlatives.)
A culture unique to these hermetic worlds has emerged — one full of people marching purposefully through long corridors in bathrobes and flip-flops, of every imaginable deep-fried food, and of an unstated but unending arms race to build water rides ever more elaborate and dare-devilish. There are water park regulars, who already seem to know all the secrets specific to each park, like where to get a towel, how to claim an unoccupied seat in the mass of lawn chairs perched in front of the rides and the wisdom of hauling in boxes, even luggage carts, stacked with cereal from home.
Though I am a native of the Midwest and the mother of two children, I am by no means one of these veterans. Not yet anyway, though my children certainly aspire to it. Still, in a tour of five water parks in recent months, I have gathered some crucial pointers — enough to offer a primer for the water park novice. For nonveterans who wish to avoid the inevitable splash from the enormous bucket, it is the first step in easing your entry.
Not everyone agrees about precisely what constituted the first real stand-alone water park, but many in the business credit Wet 'n Wild, opened in Orlando in 1977. The nation's first indoor park appeared more than a decade later with the expansion of the Polynesian Resort Hotel & Suites in Wisconsin Dells, which, in essence, erected a roof overhead as a way to solve the seasonal woes of trying to do business in a Midwestern climate.
By the early 2000s, the indoor water park market exploded in this country, according to officials from the World Waterpark Association, a trade group. The most notable growth in the overall water park business in recent years seems to have turned to municipally owned operations (and old public pools transformed into splash pads, sprayers and slides) and a booming Asian market. But indoor water parks remain an area of moderate expansion. Five or 10 new ones open a year, adding to the roughly 150 that exist, mainly in the nation's midsection.
Inside many of these parks, there is essential, standard fare: a padded area where young children can toddle through water sprayers and flop down mini-slides into the shallowest of puddles; a surfing ride that mimics an ocean wave (and looks as mortifying to the novice as real ocean surfing); a lazy river that sends people bobbing on floats around a mesmerizing, gentle path and on and on; a wave pool that bounces riders up and down, up and down, up and down, until a wave calms and a new one sets in; and, of course, all variety of water slides and rides.
MONICA DAVEY is chief of the Chicago bureau of The Times.
