KeyLime Cove Resort & Waterpark Grand Opening

By: Kelly Skoty

http://kellybelly.net/
http://shootfromthebelly.com/
AIM/Skype: kellybellydotnet

Justin and I arrived at KeyLime Cove around 4:15pm. Walking in, I did feel a bit like I was walking into a tropical paradise — the decor was of the stereotypical “tropical/Caribbean” variety and was consistent throughout the entire facility.
Check-in was fairly quick and painless. I received a bunch of pamphlets and information on the resort in my media kit — including a handful of tokens to spend in the RipTide Reef Arcade. Nice.
We also received our RFID wristbands — KeyLime Cove is the first fully cashless (and keyless) water resort. With the RFID technology embedded in the wristband, you don’t need to carry any money with you, which just helps keep up the carefree feel of the resort. The wristband is used to unlock and enter your stateroom, pay for your meals, buy stuff in the gift shop and fill your pockets with tokens in the arcade. You can even buy stuff from the vending machines with a wave of the wrist, which as a technophile is right up my alley. We linked our account to a credit card to automatically charge any purchases, but the better option for parents probably is to pre-fund their children’s wristbands so you can monitor or limit how much your kids spend.

Once we checked in we headed to our room to drop off our bags and check the place out.We were going to stay the night in the Queen Deluxe Stateroom. This is one of the smaller rooms available at the resort, but it’s far from being considered “small” compared to most places I’ve stayed. The room had two queen beds plus a sleeper sofa, so there was plenty of sleeping space for a small family.

The first thing I noticed is that the room still smelled new, like paint and new carpet. Added bonus — there weren’t any weird stains on the comforter… to the contrary, it still had the fresh-out-of-the-bag stiffness to it. It was a bit disconcerting to know that we were the first people to spend the night in the room.

Every room at the resort has an HD television (with standard local Comcast digital cable service) and an iHome in it. The latter was nice because we were able to plug in our iPhones and relax to our own music, and our nightly ritual of falling asleep to music was not interrupted.
What I’ve never seen before is that we had the option to have housekeeping remake the bed or replace the sheets each day to save on water and energy. There was a similar option available for the towels in the bathroom as well.

Here are a few other shots I took around the room: 1 2 3

After we got done checking out the room we decided to spend our free time before the reception to explore the place. The first (and nearest) stop was the RipTide Reef Arcade to spend the tokens we had been given.
The arcade is huge — 8,000 square feet of fun. We played a few games, including my favorite… DDR Supernova. There were a wide variety of games to choose from — a number of “crane” games, Skee-ball (called Ice Ball here), a few shooters and a retro Ms Pacman/Galaga game.
After our tokens were gone we went to explore the rest of the resort. The waterpark was still closed, but we got a good view through one of the many windows that overlook the park. DW Anderson’s was closed in preparation for dinner, and the Paradise Mist Spa was not yet open (though they were offering complimentary neck and hand massages in the main street), and I didn’t see any indication that an exercise room was on the premises. The bulk of the shops were open and we peeked our heads into all of them.

After wandering around and taking some photos, we stopped at the Crazy Toucan Margarita Grill for a drink — I had tried a sample size of their margarita earlier and had to go back for more.

At 6pm we headed down to the first floor and into the waterpark for the cocktail reception. We sat around and sipped a virgin Mai Tai (I think it was sans alcohol, I certainly didn’t taste any). There were a number of tropical drinks to choose from, not just Mai Tais, and plenty of appetizers were getting passed around as well. We snacked on bacon-wrapped shrimp, chicken empanadas, fried plantains with mango salsa, and batter-fried grouper.

Right around 7pm “Famous Dave” Anderson and the mayor of Gurnee Kristin Kovarik addressed the crowd to welcome them to KeyLime Cove.
After their speech we headed over to DW Anderson’s Eatery and Ice Cream Parlor for dinner.
We started off with the onion rings, which came with a delicious jalapeno pineapple sauce. For dinner I chose the Old Fashioned Chicken Salad Sandwich while Justin had the BBQ Burger. The chicken salad was delicious, the bun was perfectly toasted, but the fries were way too salty for my taste.

We skipped dessert — too stuffed from dinner — but there were two ice cream creations that caught our eye. Both of them were “coming soon,” and our waiter Brad said that was because David Anderson had yet to approve them. The first is the “World’s Largest Ice Cream Sundae.” This consists of 85 scoops of ice cream, and comes to your table in a garbage can! If that’s too much for your family to handle, you can order the “Kitchen Sink,” which is made up of only 35 scoops of ice cream and all the toppings you can handle. As indicated by its name, this one comes served in a sink.

When we returned to the room after dinner, the beds were turned down and there was a box of Godiva chocolates on the pillow. Swanky.
We went to bed fairly early in order to wake up bright and early on Friday so we could make it to the waterpark when it first opened at 5:30 in the morning — an ungodly hour especially since we didn’t get a lot of sleep. Because it wasn’t too packed we managed to get on a lot of the rides in a short amount of time. We went through KeyLime Creek (the lazy river) three times, the Hurricane’s Vortex once, and each of the two tube slides (Wahoo! and Screamin’ Banshee) once within about an hour.

All the slides we tried were awesome — I’d never really been into water slides but I’m glad that I braved these.

Sadly, we had to leave shortly after enjoying the waterpark so we missed the grand opening ceremony at 9:30am. The water resort opened to the public at noon on Friday, February 29th, 2008.

My Final Opinion: The resort is geared towards families with young children — this place is perfect for kids and has a ton of activities to keep the tykes occupied. We were completely welcomed by the extremely friendly staff and we definitely had an enjoyable time during our stay at KeyLime Cove. At one point on Thursday evening I remarked to Justin that I totally forgot that I was still in Gurnee with a few feet of snow outside the door. This is the point of the resort — a get-away without having to travel outside of the Midwest.

I have more photos on my Flickr account, so check it out if you want to see some more shots. I should upload a few more soon once I develop the film in my Horizon.

[+/-] click to show/hide this post