I’m headed out to meet up with Marion. I was told to pack my swimsuit. My dad would have called them swimming trunks, something I never quite figured out.

I wore trunks and we put our suitcases in the boot of the car.

I followed her instructions, although the temperature outside is well below the freeze-your-aspirin-off point on the Fahrenheit scale. All I know is that there is a birthday to celebrate and there is evidently some swimming involved.

I have read about people who take the polar plunge. I think of them all as being Wisconsonians who talk funny.

“Ya, da vater feels guut.”

People who go out nearly naked in subfreezing temperatures to take a swim are, in my mind, left over genetic stock from the Norsemen who carried clubs, wore boots made of wolf hide, and did not wear trunks of any kind under their bear skin coats.

I hear that if you take the plunge, the capillaries beneath the skin fill with blood. Your body takes on the appearance of a boiled lobster. After about 30 seconds, if you survive the rapid heart rate, your extremities begin to go numb because the body is sending all your blood to protect your vital organs, which you, the crazy Norseman, just threw into a totally foreign environment.

I guess you get used to it the more you do it. You make certain mental and physiological adjustments in order to stay under longer. Your body releases endorphins that give you a euphoric feeling of being really alive. One guy from Maine calls it “a high like no other.”

Me? Don’t need it. Coffee gets me going. I’ll stick to coffee.

My fears are relieved when we pull into the parking lot at Great Wolf Lodge. The kids spent the night on the family package and have already been immersed in the water park frenzy since yesterday. This entire venture is a delayed birthday gift for Caleb who turned 8 less than 24 hours after Everett turned 8 back in early December.

I watched, years ago, as this monstrosity got under construction along the interstate. I thought these people, whoever they were, had lost their ever-loving minds building this thing way out in the middle of nowhere. There was one McDonald’s and one gas station at this exit, and one dilapidated old motel. Nobody comes here.

“They’ll go bankrupt,” I said.

The parking lot is about the size of Zimbabwe, and when we turned the corner, it was full. So, I might have been wrong about their demographic studies. Evidently, nearly everyone from Georgia and Alabama, along with their cousins from Mississippi, will drive here to swim in the dead of winter.

First of all, it’s called an Adventure Park. Says so right on the front door. You step inside and there is a rock-climbing wall to your right. Putt-Putt right in the middle. A Ten Paw bowling alley to the far left. A ropes course between platforms that hover high overhead. Around the corner are a half-dozen places to eat.

Every kid under six is wearing a furry headband that looks like a pair of wolf ears. Every thirty-something mom and dad are wearing worn faces that keep saying over and over, “We’re doing this to make memories.”

You should know that the lodge does not take good old American greenbacks. Your money is no good here unless it’s plastic.

I stepped up to play putt-putt with the boys. The teenager behind the counter says, “That’ll be $7.99.” I reach for a ten, folded up in the front pocket of my jeans. She says politely, “Sir, we don’t take cash.”

I guess it’s my own fault that I don’t own a debit card. I still write checks. And I hate putting $7.99 on my credit card, but I slip it out, tap, and pay the young lady.

Marion’s kids were really just killing time in the arcade waiting on us to get there. The real deal was to get on to the water park. Once the last ball disappeared on the last hole, we headed that way.

I still had on my jacket. Mind you it’s January outside.

Bobby warns me, “It’s really hot and muggy in there.”

Boy was it! This place is the size of a Delta hanger. The humidity is thick enough to qualify as a temperate zone. The crowd noise echoes and reminds me of my high school gymnasium in basketball season.

The first thing I notice, I have on clothes and no one else does. It’s odd, in the dead of winter, to see so many swimsuits and swim trunks. And because it’s winter, all the white folk are really pasty white.

I’m not sure that winter is a good time for exposing the human flesh in such massive quantities. Tans are good, I say. A good tan can mask some of the imperfections. But here. Now. Those imperfections are just hanging out there in plain sight.

And after I make the trip to the locker room, my pasty grandpa belly is exposed to the world with the rest of them.

Mercy!

There’s a monster kid’s play world in the middle. Stairs to climb. Huts to hide in. A few slides. Water is pouring, spraying, or shooting from every direction. Fountains come up out of the floor. Massive buckets fill, tip, and dump on tiny heads below.

Over in the corner is a bank of tiny-tot slides with an ankle-deep pool. The Wolf Wave is on the opposite side of this cavernous space. People just standing in waist-deep water. Some chest-deep. Waiting. If it wasn’t for the water, you might think they were all standing on a Marta platform waiting for the next train.

Then the wolf howls. The crowd applauds and cheers. The waves come, one right after another. Moms bobbing up and down with cell phones trying to get pictures of small children in life jackets bobbing up and down.

We spent most of our time around the Lazy River, which was about as lazy as the Atlanta Motor Speedway. The water jets in turn three were strong enough that I spun out several times as I rounded the curve.

In other aquatic fun, I fell three stories through small plastic tubes designed to publicly expel old men on their backsides in the wading pool at the bottom. I crossed over a floating log ropes course. The seven-year-old tiny girl right in front of me made it with no problem. I fell off the second log and had to drag myself to the finish line. I also split a twenty-dollar cheeseburger with Marion, which I gladly put on my credit card.

I gotta admit, I have been skeptical of this place since it’s inception. The whole idea just seemed whacko to me. Left to my own curmudgeon ways, I probably would never have stepped through the door.

But grandkids see the world differently. I see a non-cash-taking-pasty-skinned-world-for-gawdawful-tattoos. They see adventure. They see a break from the winter doldrums. They see new discoveries.

We had fun. We played hard.

I took my Ibuprofen and was in bed by 8 o’clock.