With the recent demise of CoCo Key it is not easy to find water slides in the winter where you don’t have to leave the state.  But we were anxious and needed a water slide fix so we checked out Water Works in Schaumburg on the weekend and went to the Glenn for Splash Landings on Wednesday to check out their indoor water slides.  Water Works is $7 for adults and $5 for kids for residents and $2 more for non-residents.  Glenview’s facility is $5.75 per person.

We arrived at Water Works around 1:00 and it was deep in the heart of Schaumburg.  The locker rooms are in good condition and have room for lots of lockers.  When you leave an ID at the front desk, you get a key to one of the lockers which is nice so you don’t have to drag everything out to the pools.  But the water facilities are what really makes this place impressive.

Water Works has two decent size water slides, conveniently painted red and blue.  There is one enclosed slide that is pretty fast and an open slide that is equally fun.  We were a little surprised that the slides dumped into about 4 feet of water but the 4 and 5 year olds we were with had no trouble navigating it.  Then there was a kids water park that was in about 2-3 feet of water.  It had small slides, fountains shooting out of the floor, hoses to spray each other with, and buckets of water that always seem to dump on the adults.  There is also a little whirlpool action toward the end of the kids’ play area.  You walk into a kind of walled off section and the current just whips you through.

There is a full Olympic size pool for adult and kids swimming with lanes and then there are two diving boards.  But the highlight of the water park is the slide in the deep area pool (12 feet deep) by the diving boards.  It is basically a small half slide about 10 feet over the water.  The slide doesn’t reach the water (that is the half slide concept) and the slide is completely vertical.  So it is just one small step from being a high dive, but instead you can sit down, slide down - extremely fast, and hit the water with a very loud smack.  My kid ran straight for it and must have gone down it almost 10 times while we were there.

Water Works has a snack shop with the essentials of hot dogs, chips, pizza, and pretzels.  I don’t think you are supposed to bring your own food, so the snack shop was a nice rest area.

Splash Landings has not made quite the same investment as the Water Works.  There is an olympic size pool and then a kids pool.  There is a big twisty slide that is pretty fast and then some standard water falls, fountains and sprays.  It is a nice place and when there are a lot of kids around it is pretty fun. 

For the money, Water Works is an exceptional value.  It is no commercial water slide, but it has plenty to do and there were kids there as old as 10 or 11 having a fantastic time. We did at least 3 hours there and brought home 2 kids that did not even make it to the toll both before they crashed out asleep.  We highly recommend the Water Works.

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Larry and Donna

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Venues. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. , or if you would rather receive an e-mail, please subscribe to the e-mail in the lower right hand corner of this page. Both comments and pings are currently closed.