It’s summertime. It’s hot outside – roughly 95 brazillion degrees, last I checked. What are you supposed to do to help beat this crazy summer heat???
If you’re anything like me, your preference is most likely to curl up into a ball next to the air conditioner with a slushy in each hand and wait for the temperature to drop down to a more reasonable level!
Otherwise you probably just want to go to the water park … which is fine too, I guess, if that’s really what you want to do…
They say there’s nothing like plummeting down a water slide at 50 miles per hour or getting tossed around the waves like an unlucky beach ball between a couple of seals to stay cool when the blistering sun is looking to make beef jerky of us all. Whether you’re into surfing or sliding or just paying $17 for a kitschy towel that you’re no doubt going to lose within the next six hours anyways, water parks provide an undeniably refreshing $55/person experience that you could’ve easily enjoyed by just going to the beach instead for free!
Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true … because the beach, while known for its white, sandy shores and shallow waters that welcome an entire ocean’s worth of fishies to nibble on your toes while you swim, is still quite lacking when it comes to things like insane water slides that you go down in a tube and insane water slides that you wish you could go down in a tube because it’s just you and a 120-foot vertical drop, not to mention of course my own personal favorite – the lazy river.
Now expectedly I’m not one for these types of water slides that require me to change my swimsuit between every single ride – if you get my drift – but the lazy river is an attraction that was truly designed with my kind of people in mind. Hell, it’s got lazy right there in the name, so you know that it’s gotta be good! No swimming is required, no physical exertion of any kind, really – just float and drift and fantasize about that $9 hot dog that you’re thinking about getting after your third or fourth pass around…
Some of these young whippersnappers like to go to water parks for the thrill of bouncing down water slides or for the chill of getting a six-foot wave dropped on their faces every 90 seconds in the wave pool, and that’s cool if danger and simulated drowning are your idea of a fun summer’s afternoon. Me, I can handle a few of the tamer slides – I find that a good strategy is to pay attention to the height restrictions posted at the entrance to each slide and then choose the ones that let the shortest people in the park on without a problem.
Any water slide that involves more falling than actual sliding is off limits for me!
But there’s something to be said for a day spent with your toes tucked in sand that’s never seen a seashell nor crab, watching the waves crashing reliably to shore along with those guys and girls that never really learn how to time the waves, and ultimately knowing that even though you did pay fifty-five bucks a pop for the privilege of water slides and properly scrutinized hot dog vendors, somewhere out there is another family – one that paid $95 to walk around a theme park, standing in hours upon hours of endless lines without so much as a lazy river or family-sized inner-tube rafting adventure in sight.
Those poor, sweat-drenched, miserable suckers – do they have any idea how hot it is outside?!