Harper was buckled into the back seat at 9:38 on Saturday morning with her goggles already pushed up on her forehead. School let out Wednesday. By Saturday she had finished two library books, sorted her bookshelf by color and asked me four times what time Point Mallard opened.
Point Mallard is Decatur's big city park on the Tennessee River, less than ten minutes from our carport on the southeast side of town. The water park opens every Memorial Day weekend, and for our family that is the real start of summer, more than the last day of school or the first 90-degree afternoon. The wave pool is the main event. Decatur will happily tell you it was the first wave pool in the country when it opened in 1970, and Harper will happily tell you it is still the best one, though she has been in exactly one other.
We got there just as the gates opened, which is the only way I would do an opening weekend. By 11 the chairs in the shade were gone and the line for the slides went down the stairs. By noon the concrete around the wave pool was hot enough that Harper did the fast tiptoe walk, and I was glad I had made everyone wear water shoes.
Ben spent most of the morning standing in the deep end letting the waves knock him over on purpose, which Harper later ranked as the number one event of the day. The slides came second. A soft pretzel at 11:45 came third, and I suspect it would have come first if she'd been a little hungrier.
The season-pass decision
Tickets went up this year. With the new $2 facility fee on each ticket, we paid $32.50 for each adult and $27.50 for Harper, so $92.50 to get the three of us through the gate. That is a lot of money to stand in waist-deep water, but it is still less than one night anywhere with a real beach.
The question every May is the season pass. This year it was listed at around $155 a person, so about $465 for the three of us. At $92.50 a visit, we would need to go five times to come out ahead.
So I did what I always do and opened the spreadsheet. I had already mapped out Harper's summer last week for the childcare math: five weeks of city day camp, a week of art camp, a week of soccer camp and two weeks of camp grandma in Florence. Once I blocked out the weekends that already had plans, I counted three realistic Saturdays for Point Mallard. Maybe four if June is kind to us.
Three visits at the gate price is $277.50. That is $187.50 less than the passes, and nobody has to feel guilty on the Saturdays we pick the couch instead. Ben's vote was quick: "We'll go three times and be happy. With the passes, we'll go three times and feel bad about it." No pass this year.
The park has also offered half-price admission on certain weekday afternoons in past seasons. The days have changed over the years, so check the current schedule before you plan around it. If it lines up with a Monday when I'm working from home, I will be the person logging off at 4:30 with a towel already in the car.
When to go, and one tip
Go right at opening, especially on a holiday weekend, and claim shade before you do anything else. Leave by mid-afternoon if you have a kid who gets cranky when the sunscreen wears off. Ours does. I do too.
The tip: leave the cooler in the car and plan a late lunch outside the water park. We packed turkey sandwiches, grapes, a bag of chips and frozen water bottles that worked as ice packs until about 1 and then turned into cold water. We left around 2:30, found a picnic table under the trees in the park and ate with wet hair and wrinkled fingers. Nobody complained about the wait, because nobody had the energy to complain about anything.
Moose met us at the door and sniffed the cooler like he had been personally left out, which he had.
What it cost
- Gas: about $3 (it's ten minutes from home)
- Tickets: $92.50 (two adults at $32.50, one child at $27.50)
- Cooler lunch from home: about $14
- One soft pretzel and two lemonades at the concession stand: $16
- New sunscreen, because last summer's bottle looked suspicious: $9
Total: about $134.50. Not nothing, but it bought a whole day of summer ten minutes from our house, and I had my feet up by 4:15.
