Family, travel, mom blog | Theme Park Mom (Leigh Caldwell)

Adventure Island opens for the season later this week, and the Tampa water park is offering two new ticket deals this year:

The Adventure Island Weekday Pass allows you to pay for a day at the park and come back on weekdays for the rest of the season. You can buy this pass online for $41.95 for both children and adults.

The weekday pass is obviously a great deal for local residents who want to visit several times during the season. But it’s also a good deal if you are vacationing in Tampa and think you will want to go to Adventure Island more than once.

If you live in Florida, the water park is also offering an Online Exclusive Florida Resident Offer, which gives you a free ticket to Adventure Island if you buy a ticket to Busch Gardens Tampa Bay. This ticket costs $74.95, and you must buy it online before you get to the park. Choose this deal if you are a Florida resident and you just plan to visit each of these Tampa parks once this year.

Adventure Island opens March 13-14 for a preview weekend and will be open for the season from March 22 through Sept. 6.

You can now book a room at the brand-new Coco Key Water Resort in Orlando, which opens April 15.

The resort has 386 rooms and is built for families, with dozens of options such as two-bedroom suites and rooms that connect side-to-side or back-to-back. Larger families that book adjoining rooms will get a $30 price break over the cost of two individual rooms.

And then there’s the water park! CoCo Key Water Resort will have 8 water slides, children’s play areas, a teen area and a quiet pool zone, all under a canopy.

There’s also a full-service restaurant, food court and grab and go market on the property, so plenty of options for eating.

Here’s how the pricing works: You book your hotel rooms (rates range from $99 to $149 per night), and then pay an additional $19 per day, per room resort fee, which covers unlimited access to the water park for up to four people, as well as your in-room Internet and other children’s activities at the hotel.

This new hotel and water park is centrally located on International Drive in Orlando. Coco Key will offer free transportation to and from Universal Studios Orlando, Islands of Adventure, SeaWorld Orlando, Aquatica and Wet n’ Wild. It’s about a 20-minute drive away from Walt Disney World.

Aquatica officials are promising the thrill of the half-pipe in a family waterslide now under construction at the Orlando water park.

On the Omaka Rocka, riders will speed down flumes and wind up in funnels, where they will rock back and forth, feeling the near-weightless sensation that skateboarders and snowboarders feel in a half-pipe.

Artist’s renderings of Omaka Rocka show that park guests will ride the waterslide on tubes.

This is the first major ride added to Aquatica since its opening for the 2008 season.

On a recent visit to Holiday World, workers had already cleared the site where the massive water coaster will sit. The Wildebeest will be 1/3 of a mile long, and will sit here, on a two-acre plot behind the Bahari wave pool inside the Splashin’ Safari water park.

Park goers will notice it’s a very different water ride right from the start, because there won’t be any stairs to climb to get onboard. Riders will board their toboggan-style cars at ground level, then get a conveyor ride to the top for a four-story drop. Linear Induction Motors – the magnetic system that propels many newer steel coasters – will power the rest of the 2 1/2 minute ride.

Here’s a look at Holiday World’s Point of View simulation for The Wildebeest:

The folks at Holiday World have set up a Web cam so that coaster fans can track the Wildebeest’s progress. They are already taking delivery of some of the fiberglass parts of the water coaster.