East Never Does Meet West at Schlitterbahn...
Written: Aug 15 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great rides, fair prices, free parking, great rides...
Cons: Separate areas far apart makes park difficult to use...
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for a really FUN waterpark in Central Texas, look no further than Schlitterbahn. It's a CLASSIC!
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| mrkstvns's Full Review: Schlitterbahn |
Hard to believe, but true. Summer's almost over. School buses are back on the roads and airfare deals should be heading back into the affordable zone any day now. Before sending Mrkstvns Junior into the hallways of academia, I figured a well-deserved totally fun end of summer blowout was called for, and so I packed up the family and headed out to San Antonio to do a few days of no rest, no relaxation, but lots of fun and thrills.
What better place to start the party weekend than at the biggest and best water theme park in Texas: the often imitated, but never duplicated Schlitterbahn!
The Rides, Dude! The Rides!
If it's a water ride, Schlitterbahn has it. Heck, they probably invented it.
Innovation is a great thing, and I think Schlitterbahn's Boogie Bahn has to be one of the coolest innovations in water parks. It's really a surfing simulator more than anything that fits the more conventional categories of tube rides, water slides, or even blaster coasters (of which Schlitterbahn has several). Hop on the Boogie Bahn and hang 10 (well, at least until you go tumbling off the board, which if you're like me, will be about 5 seconds flat). Ah well, maybe I'm better suited to something I can't fall off of --- like one of the blaster coasters.
Blaster coasters are cool, and are my favorite thing to do at Schlitterbahn --- I just love the adrenaline rush! The idea behind the blaster coaster is simple: basically you're catapulted via high pressure water jets. The jet shoots you up a big incline, then you rocket down the slides on the other side...an awesome experience! Schlitterbahn's biggest blaster is called Master Blaster, and it's not for the faint of heart. The sucker is big and it's fast.
Most of the blasters are really for teens and up --- but I give Schlitterbahn credit for opening up the blaster concept to families with short adventurous spirits with their Family Blaster. This is kind of cool because Dad goes on the tube contraption with the kids. It's the slowest and lamest of the blasters, no doubt about it, but at least you don't have to tell the 6-year old that he's S.O.L. when everyone else in the family is doing Master Blaster or Dragon Blaster.
Of course you've got water slides. Lots of 'em. You've got fast body slides that shoot you down the hills and around banked curves faster than a bobled on a glazed ice. You've got the almost claustrophobic wildness of closed-in tube slides, like the Soda Straw. Then you've got the head-first sled sensation of rides like the Downhill Racer. Some of these, like Downhill Racer, are too intense for the smaller kids, but I had no qualms at all about letting a 5-year old (a 5-year old with pretty strong swimming skills, admittedly) do the Double Loop slides --- especially given the number of lifeguards that Schlitterbahn has watching over everything. The only real problem I have with letting a kid do things like that is that you just can't ever convince them to move on and try something else!
Tube rides are huge at Schlitterbahn. The biggest of 'em is their Ragin' River, which to be honest, doesn't do quite as much ragin' as you might think. There's a few bumps and drops along the way, but it's mostly a fairly leisurely float ride, though if you do have kids under about 6 or so, I'd recommend getting the kid tube instead of just a small inner tube --- it's the only way you'll keep junior close by. There are several more tube rides. I thought Hillside Chute was quite cool, but I didn't care for the long lines...guess it goes with the territory though. Ah well, you can get away from the lines by floating around in the lagoon, or maybe in one of the pools.
It's kind of strange, but even on a blazing hot South Texas afternoon in the middle of August, settling back in one of the huge hot tub pools feels pretty darn good, plus they tend to be close to the kid water parks, so you can sit and loaf while junior burns off a few thousand excess Hershey bars and Mountain Dews.
The Downside of Geography...
Schlitterbahn has some great rides, no doubt about it. What they don't have is enough contiguous real estate to put the whole park together in one place in a way that's convenient and easy to explore.
If you look on Schlitterbahn's park maps, you'll see that the place is split into two totally distinct parks, with a little obstacle called the town of New Braunfels in between. I exaggerate only slightly. To get between the two disconnected halves, Schlitterbahn provides frequent trams, but it can still involve a fair chunk of time to jump between parks. It's an odd arrangement, and I won't say "but it works" because it really doesn't work all that great. It's a nuisance, and in practice, I think most people (me included) will end up focusing on one section of the park for most of the day.
In general, if you're an adventurous teen who craves speed and action, you'll probably be happier staying over on the Schlitterbahn East side of things, where all of the blaster rides are located as well as the Boogie Bahn. If you're more the family kind of guy with younger kids, or the kind of person who prefers tubes and white water kind of attractions, then I think you'll be happier on the Schlitterbahn West side of things.
Speaking of which, let's run down a few other points about figuring out how to maximize the bang for the buck in a Schlitterbahn outing...
Some Recommendations....
1. Get there early. Lines form pretty quickly and by noon or so, they'll exceed an hour wait at the more popular blaster rides in the East or the more popular tube rides in the West. If you get there early, you can get a quick ride in with minimal wait, jump back in line for a wait of 30 minutes or less.
2. Stay late. Lines die down after about 4:30-5:30pm. If you hit the park in mid-summer, the place is open as late as 8. Use that 5:30-8pm window of short wait times to get in a few extra runs on your favorite rides. The crowds of families blew out already. Enjoy the relative tranquility.
3. Figure out what's important to you before you waste precious "early" or "late" time on rides that never get long lines. Also, the blaster rides get lines faster and earlier than tube rides. If I were most interested in the excitement rides and I was trying to maximize ride time and minimize line time, I'd start the day with Master Blaster, then do the raft or slide rides in Blastenhof, move over to Surfenburg to do the Boogie Bahn and Dragon Blaster, then hit the tram over to Schlitterbahn West and do the tube rides, then move on from there...just a suggested strategy.
4. Bring a lunch. The food at Schlitterbahn was so-so, fairly expensive, and the lines were painfully slow. Seriously! I spent more time waiting to buy my lunch than I spent in the Ragin' River tube line. On the plus side, I grabbed a sausage-on-a-stick for myself and was shocked to find that the sausage was a real sausage with genuine texture and flavor --- it didn't taste like the filler-laden glorified hot dog that you get at most mass-market places.
5. Got little kids? Get a life jacket and/or kid-friendly tube at the customer service area (not at the main tube pickup / dropoff area). The kid-friendly tube is great---it even has handles so Dad or Mom can hang on and make sure junior doesn't get separated.
The Logistics...
Schlitterbahn is located in New Braunfels Texas, about 30 miles north of San Antonio, just off I-35. Tickets are a tad expensive at $32 per adult and $26 per kid, but you can sometimes find $2 off coupons in flyers at highway rest stops or other places (I think I snagged mine at a Jack-in-the-Box fast food grease pit ---- not that I want to admit in public to actually eating in such places, but denying it does make it hard to explain my general praise for their pannido sandwiches).
HUGE kudos to Schlitterbahn for making parking free and convenient.
GIGANTIC kudos to Schlitterbahn for letting folks bring in their own food and drinks. Not getting gouged on astronomical drink rip-offs is almost as refreshing as doing a ride down the Wolfpack Raft Slide.
MORE kudso to Schlitterbahn for not going hog-wild on silly height restrictions that make absolutely no sense (as do some other parks, which in order to protect the innocent, I will refer to using only the secret code word SIX FLAGS).
EVEN MORE kudos to Schlitterbahn for keeping things simple and natural feeling. Some folks do complain that many of the rides (especially the tube chutes) use untreated river water. Big deal. Folks throughout Central Texas tube the rivers every day. It's fun. The water's not polluted. It doesn't hurt anybody. So what if there's an occasional leaf in it or if it's sometimes got a bit of green to it...it's still wet....it feels cool....and the folks at Schlitterbahn don't have to be dumping lots of chemicals back into the river when they're done. Lots of trees everywhere too....makes the place feel real, not totally contrived and phony, like most theme parks and water parks these days.
Official info is online at: www.schlitterbahn.com
Making a Trip Out of It...
If you're coming from a distance, you could plan to spend a couple days at Schlitterbahn (there are some hotels in New Braunfels, Schlitterbahn has some on-site rooms in their "resort" motel, and there are plenty more options if you head a half hour down I-35 to San Antonio, or a half hour in the other direction to Austin).
Bottom Line...
If you're in South or Central Texas, I know you're looking for a way to beat the heat. May I suggest Schlitterbahn? The place is big, it has more rides and pools and tubes and slides than you've ever seen in one place before. The folks who run it are not jerks: they don't rip you off on everything, and they're cool about letting you be you and about letting you do what you want to do (within the realm of safety and courtesy, of course). Best of all, the place is mellow and it's FUN.
See you in the park.
Closely Related Reading...
Also from the good folks at Schlitterbahn...
Schlitterbahn on the Beach (South Padre Island)
Recommended:
Yes
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