Muggy, echoey, and emanating a chlorine scent that seems powerful enough to disinfect the tristate area, each of the huge indoor water parks at Great Wolf Lodge properties (the one in the Poconos is 79,000 square feet) has three basic types of aquatic features. Busiest times are Sundays, when there are typically more incoming and outgoing guests than on any other day. The shortest lines can be found in the two hours after opening and before closing. Timing is everything: The indoor water park stays open daily from 9am to 9pm.The next morning, return to the water park until lunch, hit the ropes course or other nearby attractions in the afternoon, and head back inside for dinner, games and activities, or one last wistful tour of the water slides. Show up in the afternoon, tackle the water park, and have dinner on site on your first night. The water park is for resort guests only, and-important note- admission is included in your room rate. You can show up as early as 1pm on the day of your reservation to commence splishing and splashing (there are lockers to store your stuff before your room is ready). That seems the wisest choice for avoiding sensory and budgetary overload as well. The most popular length of stay, according to Great Wolf Lodge company representatives (or “pack members”), is one day and two nights. None of us had been to a Great Wolf Lodge before, but when the kids talked about it ahead of our visit, they made the place sound like a semi-mythical paradise on the order of Kubla Khan’s Xanadu-but with inner tubes. When invited to check out the Poconos resort for a media weekend, I invited along my amphibious niece and nephew, 10-year-old Sage and 9-year-old AJ (for their privacy, those are pseudonyms of their own choosing). Though there are small variations across properties, each site features a hotel with family suites and kid-friendly amenities (interactive games, a junior spa), all attached to a covered aquatic playground roughly the size of an airplane hangar and stuffed to the rafters with water slides, tipping buckets, swimming pools, and other chlorinated delights. There are now more than a dozen Great Wolf Lodges across the country-in northern Ohio, Southern California, the Dallas suburbs, the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, and lots of other places-with more on the way. This pack of wilderness-themed water-park resorts has been steadily expanding since the 1997 opening of the company’s first property in the Wisconsin Dells, which is to indoor water parks what Holland is to tulips. If you’ve never heard of Great Wolf Lodge, you probably don’t know many 9-year-olds.

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