Yesterday my family joined my daughter’s Girl Scout troop for Girl Scout day at Zehnder’s Splash Village. The troop paid for the scouts with the cookie money they raised and extra family members paid their own way. Most of the other parents also accompanied their daughters. My daughter had been counting the days until the event since she loves water parks. She was especially thrilled to be going with her friends.
Zehnder’s Splash Village is located in Frankenmuth next door to Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland. It is a little over an hour north of Ann Arbor, depending on where you live in town. They offer overnight stays with waterpark admission included and full or half-day passes. Our visit was a special Girl Scout Day package that included waterpark admission, pizza lunch, arcade tokens, and a patch.
We stayed at the water park for almost 6 hours (10a-4p). The water park features two large tube slides, a lazy river, a spray-playground with a slide, a basketball pool, a kids pool, and a hot tub. My daughter loved everything at the park. I thought the lazy river was a little small. On the plus side, tubes seemed to be readily available and we hardly ever had to wait for a tube.
My daughter really liked the concept of the basketball pool especially since there were three lily pads available for play. Unfortunately, the lily pads led to a problem as they were dominated by big kids and she was never able to get a turn on one. She did get the chance to walk/crawl across the lily pad trail which was in a separate area of that pool We finally pulled her out of that pool because of the drama it had caused.
Tables were spaced throughout the park so we were able to find two tables for our group of 13 to be able to store our bags & shoes. Single use lockers are also available in both the men’s and women’s locker rooms for one token (tokens are 2 for $3 from a machine).
I did not realize that Zehnder’s Splash Village provides towels for waterpark guests. We would have been able to pack much lighter…I had packed two towels for each of us – one to use throughout the day and a second towel to use at the end of the day. Next time I’ll bring one towel per person for the end of the day since the provided towels are small and don’t provide much privacy for changing.
The changing room facilities were on the small side and offered minimal privacy. There was one bench in the locker area and a curtained room that contained a small bench and 4 open showers. Similarly, the arcade was small and understaffed, especially when there was a group package that included arcade tokens. We visited the arcade after lunch to allow our food time to digest before returning to the pool. There was only 1 attendant on duty to handle trading vouchers for tokens, prize redemption, and machine problems. They did eventually call a second person in. On the plus side, I found the prizes fairly nice. For 150 tickets, my daughter received a cute purse. Since all of the adults also had 12 arcade tokens, we decided to evenly split them between the girls. We also had a few people cancel (pre-paid), so each of our girls received 30 tokens. Most of the games were 2 or 4 tokens, but my daughter had no problem winning those tickets with her 30 tokens.
We had a really good time at Splash Village. It was a little far for a day trip especially since Splash Universe is much closer (20 minutes vs. 1hr 20 minutes) to my house (look for another post comparing the two). I will definitely keep my eye out for discounted nights at the hotel so we can use the water park, explore Frankenmuth, and shop at Birch Run. Since we had a very busy weekend, we came home right away when we left the waterpark.
I have to apologize for not taking many pictures at the park, but I mostly left my phone in my bag because of the water. I have a few pictures of the girls in our troop which don’t show much of the park. I did find a few photos from the Zehnder’s website that I shared above.
