Tropical Islands

This weekend we went to Tropical Islands.  Not some tropical islands out in the middle of the ocean somewhere, but to a giant indoor Tropical Islands about an hour and a half from Dresden on the way to Berlin.

It was FANTASTIC!

We drove up to the giant building, which was originally built as an airship (or blimp, if you are not up on your flying terminology, like me) hangar.  It's the size of 8 football fields and could fit the Eiffel Tower inside, lying down.

See how big it is?  That's me up there, standing next to it.

Tropical Islands has a rainforest INSIDE!  It also has two giant pools, waterslides, a beach, restaurants and tons of different places to spend the night.

The entrance to the rainforest

Lots of palm trees

Ponds an plants

We arrived at about 6pm, and even though it was dinner time, we decided to explore a bit and take a swim before finding something to eat.

 We took a dip in the lagoon, a pool with a lazy river, fountains, waterfalls and even some mini waterslides.

Then we were ready for some real adventure and rode on the REAL waterslides.  There was a red slide that you went down with a tube, a yellow slide that was curvy and fun, and a blue boomerang slide that looked a little too wild for me.  Bob went down and ended up with a pool of water up his nose!

After all that swimming and water-sliding we decided to find some dinner.  We ate a tropical bbq restaurant.

It was awesome because you got to choose your own vegetables and meat and they cooked it up in super tasty sauce for you.  AND it was all you can eat.  Except we got there only an hour before it closed, and they started cleaning everything up before we could eat too much.  Which was probably good because then we weren't to full to go swimming after dinner in the South Sea.

The South Sea at night

After swimming, we got into dry clothes and took a walk through the rainforest.  Then we sat up on a terrace above the South Sea and drank awesomely tasty slushy drinks.

Everything at the Tropical Islands is open 24 hours a day (except the restaurants), but we got tired at about 1:30am and decided to head back to our tent for some sleep.

Our "Rainforest Camp" (in the daylight)

The inside of our tent

Since the temperature inside the Tropical Islands is always 80, it was a little hot for sleeping... BUT we did't sleep very long anyway, because at about 5:15am when the sun rose, the peacocks and other birds started crowing to wake everyone up.

This is the bird that sat right outside our tent making crazy noises at 5:30am:

I was ready to get up and start swimming, but Bob was still tired so I was nice and let him sleep until 7:30 when I pulled him out of bed to drag him to the best breakfast buffet ever.

Once we'd eaten all we could possibly cram in, it was time for another day full of swimming and sliding and rainforests, and even mini-golf!

We swam and laid in the sun all morning, then took another walk through the rainforest, played some mini-golf and had a snack before it was time to head home.

We had a great time at Tropical Islands... in fact, it was almost better than actually going to a tropical island because it was so close- we didn't even have to get on a plane... there were no bugs, it was always the same temperature, and Bob didn't even have to take any vacation time off from work...