Brown and Pink Polka Dots : Dells Weekend

Here is the story of making a yucky situation fun!

For Christmas this year Brent and I were given some money and told we needed to buy a gift for ourselves with it (ie. no spending it on bills, ect.) so we decided that a weekend away in the Dells would be perfect. Some good family time the three of us before the baby comes.
Brent found a package for the Mt. Olympus Village. Before we were even pregnant with Jillian (so over 4 years ago) we stayed at Mt Olympus at their Hotel Rome and it was very nice, so we figured their village would be nice as well...
Jillian and I picked Brent up from work on Friday at noon (after Jilli and I went to Babies R Us and she got to pick out the baby's coming home outfit, yeah for rewards money!) and we headed to the dells. We checked in and they told us that we were in a building that was several miles down the road. We drove to the building we were assigned to and at first there was only one other car in the parking lot. We walked in and the lobby smelled of cigarette smoke. We headed up to our room on the 5th floor and got off the elevator into a dimly lit hallway. We walked into our room and there was not much at all that made me happy, especially for the price we were paying to stay there (we were paying no were close to $50 and that is maybe what this room was worth). The flooring was coming up, the shower was full of someone's hair and gunk (not to mention I am 5'10" and the top of the show head was below my chin) the fan in the bathroom was covered in dust and Brent mistakenly turned it on and dust was flying, the edges of the bed sheets were white however the middles were people slept were yellow, the beds did not have head boards, TV was old enough it had a built in VCR, and the paint was pealing off the door ways and the bed frame. It was one of those rooms were I was just waiting to see bugs crawling.
We decided to try and hit the water park and try to make the best of it and figure out what we were going to do. The problem with it being winter in Wisconsin and having to drive to the pool is that you can't just wear your swim stuff there, you have to change there which they just have one small open area in the bathroom for changing. The toilets in both the men's and woman's bathrooms did not look like they had been cleaned in a while. We had to rent a locker for our stuff because we had to drive there we had to have our wallets and such with us and a locker was $10 and it barely fit the three of our stuff in it. We got into the water park and it was just free for all kids. I actually got spat on! We decided to have dinner in the bar/restaurant of the hotel and while the food was fine the floor was covered in food to the point I would not let Jillian walk. We asked how much to move out of our crappy hotel room miles down the road (but still owned by Mt. Olympus) and into the main building and they told us it would be an additional $300!!! An additional $300 on top of what was already paid for the crap room we were in was insane! We decided to try to stick it out...
And then there was the night with no sleep because our room was across from the elevator and each time someone used said elevator it would ding and wake me up. At 11:30 at night they were sweeping the hallway... loudly. I ended up being up over half of the night. Jillian was woken up at 5:30am by all the loud noises. Brent and I discussed it and decided there was no way we were doing a second night there. I asked Brent if I was just being high maintenance and mr. sleep in the woods man told me even he had no wish to spend a second night in that hotel room.
We packed up all of our things and drove back to the main building. Brent went to the front desk and just told them that we did not wish to spend a second night... they refunded our money for the second night without even asking if there was a reason why or if they could make it better. They acted like this is common. Also with the package that we had booked we were given a resort credit per night to spend at the hotel on food and at the gift shop. They advertise that you can spend it at any of their 12 restaurants on property, what they fail to tell you is that only 3 of them are open in the winter!
We called Kalahari to see if we could get a room there and sadly they were completely booked (Brent and I have both stayed at the Kalahari many times with church and boy scout events). We were then debating were to go. We thought about the Country Springs closer to Milwaukee but figured we were already in the Dells so we would see if we could get into someplace up there. We called Great Wolf and they were able to get us in at a good rate (not much more then for the room we had just left). They told us we could check-in at 1pm (Brent and I had never been to Great Wolf before) We decided to head over to the outlet mall to spend some time (Jilli kept insisting that she needed to go to the Mickey Mouse Library... I have no idea what that is but we made a deal that we would go to the Disney Outlet) We had fun shopping at the Disney Store (they were so sweet to Jillian!) and hanging out at the outlet mall.
We then headed over to Great Wolf and checked into our room there. What a difference! It just started out with the front desk staff who actually acted like the cared about being there. They gave Jilli a cute pair of wolf ears to wear. We went to our room and it was so nice. Nothing like the room we had just left. It was clean, up to date, lots of room. I felt fine letting Jillian walk around in the room and sit on the furniture.
We changed into our swimming stuff and headed down to the water park. It was so amazing for Jillian. There were tons of different things that she could do. She played in the one area (their water park is like three rooms which is really nice because it does not get too loud or crowded) and then we laid in the lazy river for 20 minutes before heading to the third area. Jilli only last about an hour in the water park (even with sitting on my lap in the lazy river for 20min of that time) but she had a blast (we turn her feeding tube off when we are in the pool but she is still on oxygen). We headed back up to the room and Jillian rested for a while. We then decided to walk around the hotel a little bit. We just had to be careful because there was a person making balloon animals in the lobby and I am very allergic to balloons but the place is big enough that we were just able to avoid that area. Brent and I decided ice cream sounded good for dinner so he went down and got us a sundae and brought it up to the room so Jillian could rest for a while longer.It was then time for story time in the lobby. This was super cute. All the kiddos come down and sit on the floor and there is a giant clock that tells a story. Then a person and a character come out and read a book. Once the book was over we got to meet the character. Jillian thought all of this was awesome and we loved that it was included in staying at the hotel. We headed to bed and slept (Jillian slept in her stroller all weekend to keep her at the right angle).
This morning we got up and went down to their main restaurant for breakfast which was served family style and a very reasonable price. We then headed up to the room and got ready to go to the water park again (all of the rooms there are connected indoors to the waterpark so we could just change in our room and go down). Jilli played for a little bit in the kids area (not as long as the night before) and then she was getting tired so we went to the lazy river. While in the lazy river we figured out that she could go on one of the "big" tube water slides if she went down with an adult. Brent took her first and she LOVED it so then I took her. She squealed the whole way down. We then took her over to the other kids area but she only lasted a few minutes before she started to get tired. We asked her if she wanted to do one more thing before we left the water park and she really wanted to go down the big water slide one more time so I took her down. We headed back up to our room to get dressed and our things out to the car. We then headed over to the kids craft area where they had very reasonably priced kids crafts and Jillian got to paint a ceramic magnet. Once we were done doing that Jillian was exhausted and we headed to the car and headed home. Jillian slept most of the way home.
We will be staying at Great Wolf again... we will NEVER be staying at Mt. Olympus again!

Also at Great Wolf, a lot of their pool areas had pool lifts to get in and out of as well as they had multiple of the kids areas that would be accessible to play in a wheel chair. The staff never batted an eye about Jillian's medical equipment and they were very friendly to Jillian. Great Wold is defiantly someplace that I felt was special needs friendly. (except for latex allergies, but I was able to be in plenty of areas in the hotel and be safe and the balloon artist was only in the lobby for a few hours).

Thank you Great Wolf for helping us turn around a weekend that started off really rough. We will be back!