Usually we have a big party filled with screaming wonderful children to celebrate WCK’s birthday. Those parties were starting to wear on me, so I suggested the three of us spend a night at the Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City instead of throwing a party. The Great Wolf Lodge is one of WCK’s favorite places on earth, so she quickly agreed. We hadn’t been there in a couple of years, so I’d forgotten a lot about the Great Wolf Lodge. Mostly, I’d forgotten how The Great Wolf Corporation has found wildly creative ways to just suck the money right out of you.
If the Great Wolf Lodge can charge you a fee, they will charge you a fee. WCK likes to play a game called “Magic Quest”, where kids use plastic magic wands to interact with objects around the hotel. (I blogged about that a few years ago.) We still have the magic wand she purchased back then, so we tried using it again. It was a fully functional wand, but when we tried to use it at one of the computer stations, we were told it had run out of magic. We had to take it to the magic wand store to get the “magic” “replaced” for $13.
Yes, you can put a price on magic. It costs $13.
Later, we were waiting in line to fight a giant computer-animated dragon on a screen, something we had tried to do a few times before with little success. The dragon kept killing us. A little girl in front of me showed me her magic wand. It was much fancier than WCK’s and had a big plastic dragon on the top. “It’s an insta-kill,” she told me, matter-of-factly.
Apparently, if you go to the magic wand store and pay extra, you can buy a special wand that will allow you to kill the dragon instantly, instead of, you know, working hard. We were trying to kill him through perseverance and skill, like suckers! All we needed to do was fork over more money!
Anyway. I think the tipping point for Jay was when he was charged a “processing fee” to play the video games at the arcade.
When the Great Wolf Lodge had finished sucking away our money, we returned home to find we now have three pregnant Sea Monkeys and two new babies. Looks like the Sea Monkeys had a wild weekend while we were away.