If you’re a fan of water parks – and who wouldn’t be with these July temperatures? – check out the story of local water parks, past and present.
AUSTIN, Texas — On July 1, 2022, workers dumped 15,000 pounds of ice into the pool at a water park in Pflugerville. It was a great way to get publicity for the Typhoon Texas Waterpark.
But these days, water parks hardly need publicity. They are more popular than ever, with over 1,000 water parks in the U.S. and more opening each year. Two of the best known in the U.S. are in Central Texas.
The granddaddy of them all is Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels. The park and resort opened in 1979 and has won the title of world’s best water park by the publication “Amusement Today” for over 25 consecutive years.
The 65-acre park offers every imaginable way to keep yourself water-cooled during these hot Texas summers.
The largest indoor water park in America is at the Kalahari Resort in Round Rock. The 350-acre complex opened in 2020 and features 20 indoor pools, 975 guest rooms, five restaurants and a 200,000-square-foot meeting space for corporate events – and a remarkable water park.
It’s been a long journey from a modern water park like Kalahari to what’s believed to have been the first public waterslide, which opened in 1896 in Wisconsin. People there boarded an eight-passenger wooden car for a trip down a waterslide into Lake Milwaukee. The park closed a few years later.
During the 1970s, Austin had three water parks. All of them are closed now.
The best known was Aqua Thrill Way. Parkgoers would ride mats down two twisting concrete slides. It was located along the Interstate 35 access road south of downtown. Aqua Thrill Way closed in the early 1980s, although its ghost remains: The old slides are still there in a dense wooded area and serve as a canvas for graffiti artists.