Wanderlust: A Supposedly Fun Thing I Would Definitely Do Again
When I was in my twenties, I got briefly lost in a rainforest in Borneo. My then-girlfriend and I were visiting a friend who lived in Singapore, and the three of us booked a side trip to Bako National Park. While she rested in a cabin surrounded by mischievous macaques, Ryan and I hiked among pitcher plants and blue and orange mushrooms, and crossed streams that burbled over starkly striped rocks. Every plant and animal was Disney-bright but completely wild. Upriver in the kampong, there were people who still lived in longhouses, hunted their food, and had little contact with outsiders. The rain soaked our tank tops and shorts. And then Ryan and I, caught up in a conversation about nature, global cultures, and my girlfriend’s frustrating habits, lost track of the trail.
We did not have smartphones or maps, but somehow we found our way back to camp before dark. We ate noodles outside the tiny camp store while gazing at a strip of flypaper that had been working overtime. I was wet and bug-bitten and in love with all of it, even as my girlfriend glared at me for ditching her.
This is Real Travel, right?
Like many college-educated young people working starter jobs, I believed that the best travel was the farthest flung, the cheapest, and the least scripted. We turned up our noses at tours, resorts, and cruises. In truth, I didn’t travel all that much. I always wanted a little more wanderlust than I possessed. But when I did, I was happy to stay in hostels and eat street food: fishy rice porridge in Singapore, chili-seasoned grasshoppers in Oaxaca.
Two decades later, I still want to want these things, but my spouse and I turned down a two-day camping trip with friends this summer because it fell on the weekend between two kid parties we were throwing. Schlepping blankets, towels, party favors, bags of ice, a sun shade, a cooler full of drinks, and a half dozen pizzas across the sand felt a lot like camping.
Later, our friends confessed that they’d cancelled the trip because they were too tired to camp as well.
*
This year we visited my Aunt Marc and her husband Dave in semi-rural Michigan. There are several small ponds on their property, but we got to sleep in a bed, and my aunt cooked vegan spaghetti Bolognese for us.
“Our pond has some kind of bacteria that we’re treating it for,” she said. So there would be no swimming this year, “but we’re going to book a day at Bavarian Blast.”
What is Bavarian Blast? If you’re familiar with Great Wolf Lodge, you get the idea: indoor family-friendly water park attached to a hotel. The Bavarian Inn and Bavarian Blast are in Frankenmuth, a tiny tourist town that has decided to play up its German heritage. At the border of the town, the highway passes under a giant sign that says Willkommen.
Dash, our 11-year-old, loves water parks. I assumed that Joey, our four-year-old would have fun splashing in the little kid area and that C.C. and I, as with most family outings, would find our joy in watching their joy, and come home exhausted. I delighted at the camp factor: There were rides called the Buttered Noodle and Schnitzel Swirl. But would a group that ranged in age from four to seventy actually have fun at what was more or less a wet Chuck E. Cheese?
Reader, we had…a blast.
We’d barely put our bags down in our the Zehnder cabana when Dash—who was often hesitant in new places—took off running for a set of candy-colored slides. Later, he told me the cabana made an easy-to-find home base, so he didn’t feel the need to make a mom accompany him everywhere.
Joey wasn’t a fan of the mandatory life vests that kids his age had to wear until he realized that it made him float like a mermaid in the water. He jumped and splashed in a two-foot pool next to a miniature alpine village.
I have seen online videos in which giant, overcrowded wave pools turn into a kind of mosh pit with drowning. The Bavarian Blast wave pool, on this Wednesday morning, was sparsely populated and small. Half the time, it didn’t even have waves. Every ten minutes, a giant friendly dragon wearing lederhosen blew a long alphorn to announce that the waves were on the way. If you didn’t want to get waved, all you needed to do was retreat to the sand-colored foam mats.
While Joey assigned us mermaid roles (“You have black tail. I have pink. Now let’s switch. What’s happening? We turning back to peoples!”), I watched a blind woman wade with her family, smiling each time wave gently slapped her thighs.
This was truly accessible design. We often talk about accessibility in terms of disability. At least three of the pools were accessible to wheelchair users, while a Sensory Room offered autistic visitors or, say, parents a moment of quiet. When a design element is made to help disabled people but ends up helping a wider segment of the population, that’s called the curb cut effect, in reference to the sloped slices of sidewalk designed for wheelchair users, but which also benefit cyclists and anyone pushing a stroller or shopping cart.
But accessibility can be age-based too. Why did I actually feel like I was on vacation at Bavarian Blast? The warm water and balmy temperature-controlled air certainly helped. But it was also because I’d been whisked away to a fantasy land—a world designed with families in mind.
There were spacious family restrooms with showers, spinners to dry out wet swimsuits, and complimentary plastic bags to hold, say, a pair of size 5T swim shorts that had juuuust a little bit of poop on them.
There were water features for a wide range of activity levels, from a giant jacuzzi to a lazy river to water basketball to a ninja-style obstacle course to a tube slide whose entrance was at the top of three flights of stairs. In the wave pool, I found myself chatting with C.C. and Aunt Marc more than I’d expected to. Water forces presence. I couldn’t sneak looks at my phone or tidy up the breakfast table.
I kept an eye on Joey and Dash, of course, but I got to be a participant, not just a chaperone. C.C. is more often the Fun Mom and the Sports Mom, but she gets motion sick on water slides, so I got to be Adventure Mom with Dash. I promised him I’d go on any ride he went on. Soon, we were seated tandem in a floatie shaped like a figure eight, swooping through a tunnel lit up like a rave. It was my own kind of Sensory Room, the water and the weightlessness shutting out my worries and Joey’s unpredictable potty habits.
At the top of the tallest slide, we chatted with a talkative teenager who compared Bavarian Blast to some place called Kalahari and said she’d tried out for American Ninja Warrior eighteen times.
In the kiddie pool next to the tiny German village, my aunt struck up a conversation with a woman in an ankle-length dress who said she had five kids. “So do I,” my aunt said. “Of course mine are grown. But I have four boys and one girl as well.”
The woman’s youngest child hurled himself down a wide, short slide printed with goldfish in alpine hats. Most of their words were drowned out by the rush of water, but I did overhear “Ivermectin.” Later, my aunt sounded startingly reasonable as she paraphrased the woman’s theory on how parasites cause most of our health problems and can be cured by small daily doses of horse meds, if only Big Pharma weren’t trying to stop the research.
I suppose inclusion includes conspiracy theorists as well. I made a mental note to send my aunt—who is not prone to quackery, just friendliness—an article.
My only critique of Bavarian Blast is that there was no veggie burger on the menu. I gave them a pass; Germany is known for bratwurst and schnitzel, after all. But I went to Berlin once, just after the start of the Iraq war, with that same ex-girlfriend—my first trip outside of North America—and encountered vegetarian sausage and delicious Lebanese food. Because Berlin is a real city, influenced by shifting borders and waves of immigrants, not a manufactured experience.
*
As I get older and more tired, I try not to let my sense of adventure completely atrophy. Raising children is as scary and exhilarating as bungee jumping (or so I imagine, having never bungee jumped). Instead of teaching myself to say “I would like to buy stamps” in German, I take my youngest kid to speech therapy. Instead of discovering a tiny gay club in a basement in Prague, I watch toddlers body slam each other on a padded floor when our local pizza restaurant throws a dance party, complete with a DJ. Instead of visiting El Árbol Mas Grueso (the world’s widest tree, which I stood next to outside of Oaxaca), I follow my kids into magical openings in the brambles of parks. These marvels are as real as anything. And sometimes one needs a vacation from them.
About the Author
Cheryl Klein’s column, “Hold it Lightly,” appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA. She is the author of Crybaby (Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press) and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in Blunderbuss, The Normal School, Razorcake, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her MUTHA column “Onesie, Never Worn” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022. She blogs about the intersection of art, life, and carbohydrates at breadandbread.blogspot.com. Follow her on Threads: @cherylekleinla.
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