Just a suggestion to you all

If you ever go to Wisconsin Dells, do not plan part of your vacation around downtown. Stick to the water/theme parks. Most of the stores stink and are very pricey. Why am I telling you this? Well, my youth group just took a trip up there on Tuesday/Wednesday. Tuesday we went to Noah's Ark, which was a lot of fun. They have a lot of neat water rides there but my favorite was one called 'The Point of No Return'. Its a high speed water slide ten stories tall and you get to the bottom roughly around 3 1/2 seconds (depending on your weight). Here's a picture of the ride from a side angle.




Looks pretty awesome huh? Well it is let me tell you. I didn't want to go on it at first but I changed my mind and said I'd go on it later in the day. That was a bad decision on my part because I was only able to do it one time... as the last ride I went on. There are various signs the whole way to the top designed to rattle you and make you extremely nervous (like: At this point you're still confident or At this point you are ignoring the screams). I surprisingly didn't get that nervous because I was so focused on getting to go down this super slide before they made us get out of the water (it was thundering, drizzling, dark, very windy, and the temp had cooled off to the low 70's). I made it just in time... about five minutes after I did it they sounded the "get out of the water" siren, which was, of course, followed by the sun coming out. There was another memorable ride there called 'Time Warp' where you and two or three others sat in a raft and went down a tube in darkness. After a pretty good drop for a water ride you go in circles for about half a minute before exiting into daylight and the end of the ride. The people who did this before my friends were extremely unfortunate because their raft popped and they were stuck in the circular part of the ride. They did get them out but it freaked out a couple of my friends.

So anyway, the next day was very disappointing in that the stores stunk. All way overpriced and most of the stuff wasn't worth getting anyway. The description that I heard about downtown Wisconsin Dells was very deceiving to say the least. The best store that I thought we visited was a book store... and the prices were actually reasonable. They had a Ripley's Believe It or Not but it was about fifteen bucks to get in that so virtually nobody did that. I was starting to think that we should've gone to the water park again. The day had started off promising though because we rode an Army Duck that was used in WWII. These vehicles were made for both land and water and were very useful in the war. The scenery was great and the guy driving had a great sense of humor. He first asked us how many of us were riding on a Duck for the first time and when he saw that 3/4's of us hadn't done it he added "Well good, me too." When we got on the water we went by some rock that looked like a grand piano that had fallen off the cliff. He said the only music it still played was hard rock. Really bad I know but I couldn't help but laugh at it. After that though things when downhill because downtown was a bust. We hung out there for over three hours and it wasn't very enjoyable but I was still with my friends so it wasn't all bad. So just remember, if you visit up there, stick to the water parks and don't plan your whole day around shopping in the downtown area.