Last week, we spent one night at the Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City, Kan. This is a big hotel with a giant water park right in the middle of it. It was our first time there, and we loved it. WCK got to sleep in a bunk bed in a pretend cave (technically, it was a "wolf den"), which was hugely thrilling for her. She started begging to go back the second we drove away, which is always the sign of a good vacation.
In addition to the water park, GWL has lots of other kid-friendly activities throughout the hotel. One of them is a game called Magic Quest. You go to the gift shop and buy an electronic magic wand that you can then use to go on "quests" throughout the hotel. Several hallways are decorated to look like fantasy worlds, and they have names like, "The Enchanted Forest" or "The Whispering Woods" or "Pixie Hollow". You take your magic wand to a little computer kiosk, and a wizard (who is obviously the star of the community theater in whatever town he is from) tells you what you need to find to complete your quest. For example, you need to go to the Enchanted Forest to find a lantern, and then go to the Whispering Woods to find a treasure chest, etc. You find all of these things and point your wand at them and they light up. If you find all four or five items on your "quest" then you earn a "rune."
In other words, Magic Quest is hugely exciting for a four-and-a-half year old, and way too confusing for a 34-year-old. Fortunately, most of the Magic Quest players were 12-year-old boys, and 12-year-old boys love catching an adult doing something stupid. This worked out well for me, because I was always doing something stupid in the world of Magic Quest, and I could always count on a 12-year-old boy to walk past and say something hugely condescending yet hugely helpful to our quest: "Um. Yeah. Like, are you really trying to fight the dragon? Because you can't fight the dragon until you have found the tree slime."
They would not add a "Duh", at the end, but I knew they were thinking it.
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