Great Wolf Lodge: Grapevine, TX

A unique, one-of-a-kind indoor water park within a massive hotel opened this past November but the grand opening wasn't held till the weekend of Jan. 11th.

The Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, TX, part of a chain of family destination resorts, opened with much fanfare and was full the second weekend in January.

"It was very hectic at check-in," said Olivia, a local mom who took her family there. "We even ran into two different neighbors from our old neighborhood Haslet. Everyone we talked to were from close areas like Las Colinas, Dallas, Coppell, Weatherford."

Olivia described the indoor water park as "so big and just remarkable."

"But the boys' favorite thing...there is a game you play. You use a wand to discover clues and it leads you all over the hotel to find the clues and it's a race," Olivia said. Anyway, of course you have to buy the wand so I only bought one for them all to share. Oh well, we'll know next time to budget for that."

Olivia's daughter's favorite thing was this blue slide "she must have gone down 500 times."

"She also liked the story time they had in the lobby at 8 p.m. and all the kids wore their jammies," said Olivia. "We never made it to the craft room or the kids' spa. Just too much happening. It's definitely a two-night thing if you want to see and do it all. It's actually a good price once you consider the room and water park for basically two half-days."

However, Olivia did say the resort needed some better customer service.

"Our room wasn't ready so we had to dig through our bags for the swimsuits, store our luggage complete with ice chest and they wanted $15 to rent a locker," she said. "So basically I stayed with the stuff for over an hour till our room was ready. And very disappointing as I wanted to have fun, too. Plus when you have a ton of luggage you have to wait for the elevators and it took forever. Also, there weren't a lot of food options. I was so sick of pizza, nachos, and hot dogs. I wanted veggies when we got home."