Since we didn’t have much experience with Great Wolf Lodge, we decided to launch an expedition to see what it was like as a place to stay.
We setup base camp on the slopes of Jomolangma in Nepal, at 17,598 ft. This turned out to be a mistake, since the hotel was now over 7,700 miles away. Slightly chastened, we left Everest behind, came back to Colorado, then drove over to the hotel.
The Rooms
The guest rooms are nice. They are mostly double-queen rooms, with a desk, sofa, fridge, and microwave. Our room had a balcony and a nice view of the mountains, as do, we believe, all of the rooms in the COSine block.
The rooms were spacious and comfortable.
The Layout
The conference space (where COSine will be) is all downstairs on its own floor. It feels friendly and is also quite a bit bigger than we are used to.
The main floor can be somewhat split between the main lobby area and the attractions area. The main area feels like a higher-end hotel, with a lot of wood/antler decorations.
If you take the hallway towards the attractions area, you will run into more and more miniature humans, and it is definitely designed for them. There’s a climbing wall, an arcade, mini-golf, mini-bowling, a ropes course (for kids) and various other stuff. There’s also the water park, which is 50,000sq-ft.
There’s also MagiQuest. You buy a wand (which you can bling out – although not cheaply), then do quests that involve finding particular things and pointing your wand at them. One might consider this another kid’s thing, but it is conceivable that a couple of our exploration team bought wands and spent a lot of time running quests. And that some of the others of us tried taking the wands apart to see if we could create our own quests…
We were there in September, with a lot of kids/families still on vacation, so the adventure park area was pretty busy–but not ridiculously so. We suspect that in January, it will be emptier. And the lobby-side, as mentioned, did not feel busy at all.
But if you do have some kids of your own (or feel like borrowing some from friends and neighbors) it does seem like they would have a lot of fun…!
The Restaurants
- Loose Moose – This is the buffet and is accessible from the main lobby.
- Barnwood – Slightly more upscale bar/restaurant, also off the main lobby. Limited but decent food (steaks, burgers, booze).
- Wood’s End Creamery – Ice cream! Nice!
- Dunkin’ – Donuts, coffee, breakfast things. Very much like a Dunkin’.
- Hungry as a Wolf – Pizza, salads, and pasta.
There were several others that were not open when we happened by, including The Outpost Bar & Grill, The Watering Hole, and Buckets Burgers & Bites.
And, of course, there are a ton of restaurants in the area next to the hotel if you want to venture a bit further.
Summary
Overall, we are excited about moving to GWL. The staff we’ve worked with have been incredibly nice and hospitable, and the conference center is a great space (although we’d prefer a few less pillars :-). We think COSine at GWL is going to be a lot of fun!