This summer, our family traveled west to South Dakota and Wyoming. We spent a lot of time out in nature and enjoying the amazing sights, sounds, and smells of the National Parks of the region.
As fun as all that was, we also wanted to spend some time relaxing. Because all those national parks? That was a lot of hiking. And getting to them? That was a lot of driving!
We decided to spend our first night in Rapid City at a hotel with an indoor water park so we could kick back and relax in the lazy river, splash in the pool, and laugh our way down the water slides. After a little bit of google work, I discovered that there was in fact an indoor water park in Rapid City. It is called Watiki Indoor Water Park and it’s right off the highway as you enter the city. Super convenient!
The waterpark has not one but FIVE hotels connected to it. From each of them, you can enter the waterpark without ever going outside. Perfect!
The hotel options are Residence Inn, Fairfield Inn & Suites, La Quinta, Home2 Suites, and Courtyard by Marriott. We chose La Quinta, mostly because it was the option with the cheapest rate available and we tacked this on to our trip a little late in the game, when most of our trip budget had already been spent!
Staying at one of the hotels gave us a discount on our waterpark passes, which was great! We also got to use the waterpark on both checkin and checkout day. We just paid for the waterpark passes at check in. Easy peasy!
The kids LOVED the water slides. They spent hours going on them over and over again. I spent some time in the lazy river and the “hot” tub (which wasn’t really very hot at all). There were quite a few people there but it never felt crowded, which was nice.
The waterpark has a quick service restaurant attached and you can bring your food into the waterpark area to grab a table and eat. There were changing rooms as well, so you didn’t have to drip all the way back to your hotel room. There were also lockers available to rent so you could lock up phones, keys, etc. This was especially useful the second day when we had already checked out of our hotel room but still had time left on our park passes.
The young kids area was perfect for my seven year old, although I will say that the lifeguards did not police it very well and there were often MUCH bigger kids on it.
My kids also loved the water sports area. They had a lot of fun trying to run across the lily pads.
Breakfast was a little weird. Since we were traveling in August of 2020, things were a little weird due to Covid. South Dakota is pretty chill about restrictions and such and so they left it to each hotel chain to set its own policy. Some places we stayed had real breakfast, some had scaled it back, and most had sad little “breakfast to go” bags that usually included a plastic wrapped apple, a yogurt tube, and a granola bar. Watiki was in the “sad little bag” category, but it’s ok. We understood things would be a little off right now and we made the best of it.
Our room was clean and had everything we needed–pretty standard chain hotel room. We were comfortable and slept extremely well after driving ALL THE WAY to western South Dakota!
We booked this hotel through Hotels.com because it gave us points towards a free night’s stay. If you are getting itchy to travel again after long months of quarantine, check out Hotels.com.