Atlantis Rocks!

Kristen here – Today is Friday 6/5/09. I just noticed that Chris has been writing a lot. I must be getting lazy! Atlantis was quite an experience. When we first came to Nassau, we tried to get a slip at Atlantis and were unsuccessful. I had run through the property a couple of times, and didn’t see any great loss in missing a visit. Boy was I wrong! As it turned out, I had only hit the tip of the iceberg when I briefly went through the property.

I’ll start with the water slides. There were two separate towers and a “lazy” river. I really wouldn’t call the lazy river lazy though. It had a bunch of white water sections, which proved treacherous if you fell off your tube. This I found out when Chris lost his glasses and I jumped off to find them. My knees and arms met up with concrete outcroppings formed to look like stones. They felt like stones too! The lazy river also had a narrower winding section with a wave machine at the start. The waves would travel and bank around the turns, pushing and tumbling the tubes with it. There were many points where the river would go through a pool, and you could either get out, or continue. It also stopped at one of the towers. You could get out with your tube, walk up to one of 4 slides and go down. The same tower also had 2 slides you go down without tubes.

A second tower had four more slides. One was a 60 foot vertical drop that ended up in a pool of sharks. Well, ok, there was a Plexiglas wall separating you from the sharks, but it was still amazingly cool! The amount of slides and pools and Jacuzzis and caves and rides in the park were just amazing. It took us two days to do every ride once!

Then, even more amazing than the slides were the aquariums. They were simply the most amazing collections and displays of marine life I have ever seen. The aquariums were set up to look like a lost city, with broken city pieces and staircases all over. They had every type of fish imaginable. There were hammerheads, sawtooth, nurse and lemon sharks. They also had manta, eagle and brown stingrays. The manta rays were at least 10-15 feet long! There were all of the ocean fish such as tuna, mackerel, wahoo, barracuda, and the colorful reef fish. You could observe the pools of fish from walkways above, or from tubes that winded through them below. For me, it was this that made the visit worthwhile. There may be collections like this elsewhere, but I haven’t seen them yet! If you get the chance, come see Atlantis!

Oh, and as a side note, our friends from Miacota joined us for the last day we were at Atlantis. Usually if you want to go there for the day without staying at a hotel it’s about $80 a person. They got a room at the Comfort Inn on Paradise Island for under $200 that gave all 4 of them access to the park for 2 days! That’s a savings of $440! So if you go there, do your research. It doesn’t have to be too expensive.