We’ve driven past Cobblestones Park hundreds of times over the years and meant to check it out but for some reason, we never got the chance until today.
You can really get some speed on this baby.
An impromptu family day off and desire to stick close to home in Glen Allen made this the perfect venue; finding $2/off coupons in ValPak ($2/off coupons also on the Cobblestones Park website) sweetened the deal. Our family-of-five grabbed towels, donned our swimsuits and headed five minutes up Staples Mill Road and here’s what we found:
An enormous pool. And I mean, enormous. Apparently it’s one of the largest on the east coast, and at 38,000 feet, I’d believe it. We loved the fact that it’s pretty shallow and even our six-year-old could touch in most places, and there aren’t many obstacles so we could see the kids everywhere.
Being a weekday, it wasn’t too crowded which was another bonus. This meant short lines and more waterslide fun on the two slick waterslides–one super-high fast one heading straight down and one more-tame twisty slide.
We spent several hours there, between swimming, sliding and jumping on the rhino and other floating animals that give kiddos a chance to get a jump into the water. There are also a bunch of smaller slides meant for little ones, but I noted that our six, eight, and eleven year olds weren’t embarrassed to take several turns on those, too.
I had no idea that they allow coolers which is brilliant because the one drawback we noted was that the snack bar area, even though it was plastered with “No Smoking” signs did smell strongly of smoke, so I wouldn’t have wanted to order lunch there.
We rate this park a solid “good” in terms of value and overall experience.
We ducked out for lunch then headed back–it’s open until 5:30pm so it was nice to have a hand-stamp and some flexibility to return at our leisure. The kids couldn’t seem to get enough of it, and while we were out we snagged our beach chairs as we saw that folks had brought theirs, and were able to get a little reading time in while the kids played (this was, admittedly to also catch our breath to keep up with them.)
After checking out Cobblestone’s Yelp reviews later tonight it appears the restrooms are pretty unclean, but we had left for lunch and hadn’t needed to use them while we were there. So I can’t comment there. Also note that they don’t sell tickets after 4:00pm each day.
Our eight year-old won the award for the most stairs climbed/slides accomplished. He was a machine!
There are season passes available, and if we hadn’t discovered this so late in the summer we would consider buying them (they’re actually half-price now).
For a waterpark experience without the drive to Kings Dominion and to save a bit by bringing in a cooler, it was a day well worth it at fifty dollars for our family. Hope you get to check it out and squeeze some fun out of these last hot and hazy Richmond summer days.
*Note: we received nothing from Cobblestone Park in exchange for this post, we just thought it was a little gem folks may want to know more about.
