Max and Theo have spent well over 100 nights of their short lives traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Nevertheless, they have only stayed in a hotel three times. Wes clocks in at one night so far. Suffice it to say, we have one way that we like to travel and it involves hitching up and driving our trailer to a place that needs exploring. My mother once said it was like we were dragging our house behind us. Maybe so, but that suits us just fine. When you have three kids under four years old, having your house at the bottom of the mountain you plan on hiking is pretty much best case scenario.

So when the trailer has been winterized and closed up for a few months, the campers start getting a bit twitchy. Enter the indoor water park getaway.

When Theo and Max were two, I saw a deal for a hotel/indoor water park package. Although we will keep the location of this place anonymous, let me just say it was not Great Wolf Lodge. It was far more affordable, and I just didn’t want to spend the money on the creme de la creme of water parks when the boys wouldn’t even remember it. In this case (as in so many) we got what we paid for…an overcrowded, under-regulated, glorified spray ground that left you feeling a bit dingy. And don’t get me started on the pizza we ordered for dinner.

The hotel experience only underscored why we love to camp so much. We basically followed the boys around the room sputtering various forms of no and don’t touch that. Once the boys went to sleep, Jeremy and I set up a pathetic mini bar in the bathroom and watched a movie on the laptop with a set of shared earphones. Oh, for a camp fire.

The next year, the twitchiness returned. We are shore people, water lovers, and no matter how much we try to embrace the winter weather, deep inside we are always pining for the warm and water. This time we made the splurge and went to the real deal–Great Wolf Lodge. We stayed in a suite with separate bedrooms so that the adults could avoid the embarrassing bathroom scene of the previous year.

And we got it. Even though the boys were only 3 and I was hugely pregnant, it was still so obvious why people do the winter indoor water park thing. Throw in the clock show and story time in the evening and we were hooked. The boys were young enough that they spent most of their time going down the same slides over and over, but even so they had the time of their life.

Theo, our resident existentialist, spent the entire car ride home crying that he just wanted to live there.

This winter we were back and the boys are big and I was not pregnant. We. Had. Fun.

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Jeremy and I were able to take the boys on the big slides and it was our first taste of things to come. Even though we enjoy our travels with them now, we can’t wait until the activities get just a little bit bigger, in that zip-lining, white-water rafting kind of way. The slides were fast enough to make me squeal, but the boys were brave and wanted to go again and again. We were happy to oblige.

And of course, Wes was happy to oblige as well, splashing around and then taking his nap in the Ergo.

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This time there was no crying on the way home. Theo thanked us for the trip and bragged that he had swooshed down the slide with joy (yes, he says things like that). Then the simple question, repeated over and over again in that special 4 year old way…when are we going back, huh? When are we going back? When are we…

You get it.