Knight's Action Park

We went to Knight's Action Park in Springfield over the weekend. I hadn't been in a while (not since I was pregnant with TB) and I was wholly unimpressed. Pricing is pretty expensive. For an adult to get into the waterpark, it is $23.99. If you add in a ride pass, it is an additional $14.95. If you do the math on that it is a total of $38.94. That price doesn't include the go-karts, mini golf, driving range, or batting cages they also offer. Currently, that is more expensive than going to Six Flags since they are running the "everyone pays kid's price" promotion. Even regular priced, Six Flags is only $1.05 more expensive. Knight's Action Park is also pretty small. For the rides, they are all carnival type rides and if you have little kids forget it. There are only 3 rides they can ride :( For the bigger kids there are only a few rides as well. Very disappointing selection.

The waterpark isn't a lot better, but there is enough stuff to do to keep busy for part of a day. They have a couple of kiddie areas, 4 big water slides, a wave pool, an "action" river, bumper boats and peddle boats on the lake. The wave pool is decent, although they require a tube past the 3 foot line. My kids just weren't sure what to do about that because they like being in the deeper water but not with tubes. The action river was nice and a great way to get around the back side of the park. It was one of the fastest "lazy" river's that I have been on, with a serious current, as well as sprayers, white water sections and a wave area. TB enjoyed it as much as anything else.

Seal Bay is a nice play area for middle sized kids. There are several small slides a couple of things to climb on and best of all, there were 3 bigger kid slides that were perfect for my 2. It was perfect because you could sit at the bottom of the slides and still see the ramp up to the top so you weren't walking back and forth to get them up and down. MT spent a lot of time running up the ramp and sliding down one of the 3 slides.

Besides that, they have 4 big kid/adult water slides. 2 of them are new and 2 of them are original. The new ones are the "Royal Flush" which is a bowl type slide. The other one is called the "Devil Ray" and it looks like a half pipe. You sit on a raft and slide down and up the other side, then back down and so forth. The 2 original slides are built into the side of a hill and are flat abusive. TB and I both got hurt on one and although it wasn't an active hurt, I came off the other one feeling like I had been beaten. They are old and poorly maintained, as well as too narrow to be comfortable. The twists are sharp, the bumps are hard and I was left with a headache that took the rest of the day to get rid of.

The bumper boats and the peddle boats were both nice. The bumper boats are big enough for adults to ride and younger kids are able to ride with an adult. The peddle boats are peddle boats. You do get to take them through the "feed the fish" part of the lake so the kids were able to se the gigantic fish pretty up close.

The food is marginal. We ate at Barnical Bill's and were disappointed to find out that they only offer nacho cheese sauce for their burgers. The chicken was decent and the amount of food was better than expected. I was also impressed with the price of the food. The meal (entree, fries and a drink) was around $6 and contained plenty of food.

The bathroom/changing rooms where gross. They were small and inadaquate. There were 5 stalls, one small bench and 4 open stalls to be used for changing. There was no where dry to put our stuff and no where closed to change, unless you took up a bathroom stall. The lack of privacy doesn't concern me but other might well be bothered by it.

Overall, the place was over priced, small, old and poorly maintained. Everything had paint peeling off of it and looked a general mess. I would give it 2 stars, simply for proximity. It is closer to drive to Springfield than to St Louis or Chicago for something bigger and better. If given the choice, I would absolutely drive further to one of the other options.