Two Storms on Our Water Park Day
But we still made the best of the time we had at Universal's Volcano Bay
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
Jeff loves water parks.
And while the rest of us enjoy water parks as well, Jeff has declared that any theme-park-focused vacation always has to include at least one day at a water park.
When we went to Disney six years ago, we stayed within the Disney system and spent a full day at Typhoon Lagoon. We really enjoyed the park, and thanks to a nearly two-hour delay due to area thunderstorms that sent people packing, we were able to fully enjoy the cleared-out park as soon as it was deemed safe to be in water again. The kids waited out the storm on the “beach” and played in the sand, and we rushed their little bodies from slide to slide once the storm cleared out.
As we were preparing for our 2023 family vacation to Florida, we all took one look at Universal’s water park, Volcano Bay, and made a unanimous decision: We were skipping the Disney water parks this time.
We didn’t regret it.
We didn’t get started as early as we would have all liked. After all, we wanted to get as much out of each of the parks as possible, but by the time we parked and took the bus to the park entrance, it had been open for well over an hour. Still, we were able to get all of our stuff placed into a locker and immediately try out the group raft rides.
Volcano Bay has a virtual queue system, the first such system we had experienced at a water park. Each visitor is given a wristwatch called TapuTapu and when you want to get into line for a ride, you tap the TapuTapu on the queue scanner and it tells you when to come back. That allows visitors to travel the waterways, swim in the pools, eat a snack, or just hang out in the sun. For most of the rides, it’s an ingenious system keeping visitors from getting overheated while standing still in line.1
Eventually we caught up with Jeff’s sister Kristen and their parents before exploring the rides with Kristen. We ate a lunch of pizza and white cheddar mac and cheese at Whakawaiwai Eats before putting on life vests and getting swept down TeAwa The Fearless River, a waterway that is more rapids than lazy. We managed to go down both round raft slides at Maku Piuhi and both Taniwha Tubes rides before the first of the afternoon storms hit.
The storm went through quickly, but we had to wait for what felt like forever for their lightning protocol to finally give the all-clear and the slides to reopen. We took a chance and were first in line to scan our TapuTapus for Krakatau Aqua Coaster, the only water coaster in the entire park and the hardest ride to get into. It was past mid-afternoon and we still had a three-hour wait to get onto the coaster. We were allowed to ride any slides that had no wait time, but if there was a wait time we couldn’t do it unless we got out of the queue for the water coaster.
And here is the flaw in the current TapuTapu system: you can only be in a queue for one ride at a time. Normally, this would make perfect sense, except when considering that the water coaster had consistently had a five-hour wait for the entire day. A person could waste their entire day just waiting to do that single ride. With the first wave of deserters after the rainstorm clearing out the lines, we were now down to a three-hour wait. We successfully found two more slides without waits to ride on, swam, and explored the volcano (which we also discovered provided shortcuts to different parts of the park), but still we had to set aside some of the other slides we wanted to ride on because we were in a three-hour line queue.
Then the next storm came through and after forty-five minutes it was clear that our day was done. We left more than a little bummed about the fact that we had just wasted most of the previous hour and a half waiting for a ride that we never got to ride anyway and foregoing the opportunity to try at least two more water slides.
Such is the luck of going to a waterpark in Florida in July.
Still, I can say with confidence that it may be the best water park we have ever visited as a family. And even with the primary flaw that we found in the TapuTapu system, in most cases, it actually made for a more pleasant water park experience.2 Of all of our Universal experiences, this is the one that I know we can all say with complete confidence we would do again.
And after five days of theme parks, we were ready to rest before heading home.
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More on the failures of the system later.
But seriously, they need to figure out a better way to do the line for that water coaster. Our brother-in-law works on the software for the virtual queues and he says that they could definitely find a fix if they want to. I guess they just need more complaints before they decide it’s worth exploring.