Tuesday, April 22, 2025 – Today we were all wearing water shoes — yesterday, we’d been in flip-flops and we realized water shoes were a better choice for the park. According to the material we’d been given at the marina office, the pools and beaches opened at 0900, but the waterslides and Rapid River didn’t open until 1000. Knowing that it would take a half-hour to get to the waterpark, at 0925, we called for a golf cart to pick us up.
When the golf cart dropped us off, we couldn’t believe how long the line was to buy tickets. We were happy to be by-passing that line! We joined a mob of people all speed walking through the long stretch between the entrance and the waterpark itself.
Now that we’d scoped out the park, we’d formulated a strategy to maximize the number of rides we went on today: start at the river entrance (stop 1), exit the river at stop 7, which was where the entrance to the Power Tower was, and take our inner tubes with us to the Tower slides. The waterslides let out near stop 6, then we could get off again at stop 7 and do that loop over and over again until we’d had our fill of those inner tube rides.
As anticipated, we reached the rides around 0955. We were surprised to see that a waterslide at the Mayan Temple was already running, and looked like it had been for a while. The river had not opened yet, though, and we were one of the first ones on it.
This time, Eric and Christi got a two-person tube, and they stuck close to Keith.
We liked the all three of the Power Tower inner tube rides. Here was Keith going down The Surge slide, which was the ride next to the Abyss on the top level:
Even on the second level down, the views were still beautiful. Here was Christi about to go down one of the slides on the second level down:
Our strategy to maximize the number of rides we went on worked great… except that after only an hour, we all wanted to leave the park. Christi was cold. Keith had a blister on his foot from his water shoes. Eric was hungry. We re-formulated our plan: we’d get lunch at Shake Shack now, before the lines got long. Then we’d go back to Kosmos so Keith could switch to flip-flops and Christi could put on a wetsuit.
This turned out to be a good plan. The line at Shake Shack was short when we arrived, with plenty of tables available. We were surprised to see that this Shake Shack had a full bar, with specialty cocktails on the menu. And in addition to the normal shakes, they also had frozen custard. There was a large fish tank embedded into one of the building’s walls.
We sat outside, near what we suspected to be a man made beach/lagoon, and enjoyed the lovely view of the northeast side of the resort.
When we were done eating, the line to order was really long and there were no available tables. As we were leaving, we stopped by the restrooms. We noticed there was a room with a large fish tank nearby — clearly the opposite side of the tank that was visible inside Shake Shack.
When we walked in to the room we were surprised to see that we were actually inside a huge aquarium. It was decorated to feel like we were SCUBA diving in a sunken palace or temple.
We decided to walk through the aquarium before heading back to Kosmos. This was looking back at the room by Shake Shack.
We couldn’t believe how big the aquarium was! We walked and walked, wondering where exactly the aquarium was taking us. There were also interesting decorations throughout, both in the tank and outside, some of which were creepy.
On the opposite wall, there were many small tanks set into the wall featuring creatures that couldn’t live in the bigger tank or were too small to be seen in the bigger tanks.
The aquarium finally ended (or probably more accurately, began) at the kids Barbie area, which was on the ground floor under the hotel lobby.
Our stop back at Kosmos was quick. Eric put on a wetsuit, too. We all felt like we were now properly set up to have a good time. Upon return to the waterpark, we went the Mayan Temple. It had four slides, and two went through a shark tank.
