OK – before arriving at this hotel, I sincerely thought that the water park would drive me mad. In practice, however, this was not to be the case. The water park is actually a lot more fun than I anticipated.
What almost caused me to request voluntary admission to the nearest asylum was not the excess of H20. It was the insanely annoying MagiQuest game (at a minimum cost of $25, no less) that came very close to putting me over the edge today. Chloe had been obsessively playing this interactive game since yesterday. Nine scavenger hunts plus three more complicated adventures. Hours running up and down the stairs (as I mentioned yesterday, the game’s only redeeming value is that it forces sedentary kids and parents to move their butts – and there are way too many of them, from the looks of things here) in order to find the right objects to complete a particular task. All of a player’s feats are recorded in a computer chip in the player’s $15.99 magic wand.
Picture this: loads and loads of screaming kids running around the hotel as if it were Hogwarts, wielding wands that are liable to hit you on the head if you’re not careful, and equal amounts of clueless parents – the Muggles – following their kids around like lemmings. There were also the few Ministry of Magic wannabes, whom I define as the excessively obsessed adults who talk, with nostalgia, about the difficulty they had the “first time” they ever defeated the evil goblin. I mean, really!
Chloe’s first adventure as a “Master Magi” following the completion of her nine quests was to slay the dragon. It took us approximately 10-12 tries to succeed- and only because it became clear to my darling daughter (as I started pulling out my hair in frustration) that the only way to succeed was for Chloe to do it without any interference from me. Sure enough, once I restrained myself enough to keep my mouth shut during her task, she managed to kill the fire-breathing bugger in record time.
The last two adventures were a piece of cake compared to the dragon, and Chloe, never one to be shy about her accomplishments, proudly offered to assist anyone – adult and child alike – who was a lesser mortal than she.