The second portion of our vacation took us to Santa Claus, Indiana and the amusement park, Holiday World. I must admit I wasn’t expecting much more than a low budget amusement park. Boy was I wrong!
We stayed in the nearby Lake Rudolph Campground. The campground had free mini-golf, pool, activities, fishing, and was a short walk to Holiday World. Once you enter Holiday World you have the option of moving in and out of both Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari, a waterpark. We opted to spend our first day, Monday the 21st, at Holiday World, and Tuesday mainly at Splashin’Safari.
The park provided these handy little bracelets that indicated the height of your child as well as our cell phone number in case they were to get lost. This way the kids didn’t need to be measured every time they entered a ride.
We started out with a few kiddie rides before heading to the big coasters. By the way, forecast for today, high 90s.
Holland was at the perfect height…tall enough for the big rides, short enough for the kiddie rides.
Another park perk, free suntan lotion.
All 5 somehow managed to get their faces in.
Several rides required an adult rider for children over 36” but under 42”. Joe was the lucky winner for this wonderful spinning ride…I think he was ready to get off right about now.
I remember as a kid not understanding why my dad couldn’t ride all of the rides with me. Now as an adult my stomach turns just thinking about it. Thanks to all the dads out there who “grin and bear it” for the sake of their children!
One of the neatest park perks was the Pepsi Oasis. This was not a figment of our imagination, we were not hallucinating from the heat…no, there really were free drinks located in these Pepsi Oasis huts all over the park. At any time you could walk in and grab a cup and your choice of Pepsi beverages. If you aren’t a soda drinker than help yourself to water, lemonade, Nestea, and orange Gatorade. This was awesome! I must say that the convenience of free drinks was better than expected.
London busied herself finishing off everyone else’s drinks while waiting for them to finish riding the bigger rides. It made waiting a breeze.
Joe and Holland took on the Liberty Launch.
Another neat thing in the park was a praise and worship show that we went to in the park. It included a blend of modern praise and worship songs…impressive.
A train ride
Who needs bathing suits when it’s 98 degrees? We found the splashpad and hung out there for awhile while Joe took the older 2 on the big coasters. They were completely dry within 30 minutes of leaving the splashpad.
The photographer that we brought along to capture the memories…the price was right:)
Storytime with Santa in the Christmas section of the park.
The whole bunch with Santa. Once again I was impressed by the park…there were photographers at the Storytime, looking a lot like Disney Photopass photographers with their brown safari attire, netted pockets, and Nikon cameras. They took a picture of our entire family, scanned it on a card, and told us that we could “download the pictures compliments of Holiday World”…how does this place make any money????
This park just continued to impress me. I would give the cleanliness a 5. You would think that with all of the free drinks that there would be Pepsi cups everywhere, nope. Even the bathrooms were impressively clean.
My personal favorite ride of the day was the Gobbler Getaway in the Thanksgiving section of the park. For those of you familiar with Disney World this ride was just like Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, only you were hunting turkeys. I could have ridden this particular ride over and over again trying to beat my previous score! At one point, while waiting for the others (after riding it 3 times in a row), my boys said, “no, we don’t want to ride that one again mom”.
Joe and the girls meanwhile went on a very daring roller coaster called The Voyage. Joe said it was amazing, but he could only handle that coaster once.
We stayed until park closing, went back to our air conditioned camper, and collapsed for the night.
