Hi guys! 👋 If you know me, you would know that our family love to travel and I love to organize travel plans.
This summer, we went to Silverwood Theme Park in Athol, Idaho. It's in Northern part of Idaho. It's just 7 hrs drive away from Calgary.
To hype you up, this is Northwest America's largest theme park. When you visit there, you'll see that they also have a water park that is already included in your day ticket/ pass.
If you like rides and slides, you'll definitely enjoy this place. But even if you don't do crazy rides and slides, there are still a lot of things to do for you. I also appreciate that this place has enough things to do even for little ones or even old ones. You can also rent a stroller, a wagon and a wheelchair. It's very convenient and very family friendly.
We went there for 2 days, it works for us. But if you have extra money, go for 3 days. You'll really enjoy the place.
Anyway, my first tip in planning any vacation is to do your research. I read and searched a lot of blogs, vlogs, reels about Silverwood and the surrounding areas. That's how I came up with our things to do there in Silverwood and the surrounding areas.
Here are some of the tips specifically for Silverwood:
1. It's cheaper if you buy your tickets online and it gets cheaper if you buy more days.
2. You can also bring a 12x12 soft cooler inside for your snacks and drinks. There are also a lot of water fountain in the water park and dry park.
Although, we didn't bring our own cooler, we just brought 2 water bottles with ice inside. We also brought some snacks like jerky, oreos and some cookies. We still wanted to try their snacks and other food their. Actually, their food is not so expensive. I think it's just fairly priced.
3. Know the layout of the park and decide what do you want to do. So, I did this for our family. I had 2 days scheduled plans. We try to follow it, although there are some minor changes. But I think having a plan saved us from going through and from 2 parks.
I will include our 2-day schedule here.
4. Get a locker. If you're like us, we went to both parks, then, get a locker in the main street. It's located behind the carrousel. It's closer to both parks and to the parking area. We rented a locker for 2 days. It's $10 for the whole day.
We put our wet clothes their and towels after we're done with the water park.
5. Come early. The park will open at 11am. But, you can come before 10am to secure a nice parking area near the entrance. You can have your bag checked, you can start your day with a coffee at Silverwood Coffee Roasting Company. You can look around and get some souvenirs there.
We did it for 2 days, our hotel is 20 minutes away from Silverwood.
For 2 days, we arrived there around 9:45am. It was great. It was not yet busy, we ate our breakfast there, have our coffee, find a locker and take some pictures. It was amazing
5. Come early. The park will open at 11am. But, you can come before 10am to secure a nice parking space near the entrance. You can have your bag checked, you can start your day with a coffee at Silverwood Coffee Roasting Company. You can look around and get some souvenirs there.
We did it for 2 days, our hotel is 20 minutes away from Silverwood.
For 2 days, we arrived there around 9:45am. It was great. It was not yet busy, we ate our breakfast there, have our coffee, find a locker and take some pictures. It was amazing!
6. They don't accept cash in the park except the Silverwood Coffee Roasting and Company. So we put some money in a "cash band". We used it to pay for the food, the midway games and souvenirs.
7. Our plan next time if we are sure that we are going to Silverwood, we can buy the tickets online because the tickets are not "date-specified". Then, we can allot money every now and then to our "cash band".
Anyway, for any unused cash, you can always refund it at the end of the day or at the end of your stay.
Here's our schedule for 2 days.
I found this schedule from a blog as well. We just adjusted this one to some of the things we like.
Day 1:
Come before or 10am
1. Boulder Beach Water Park
One person should secure a place to sit down. There's a lot of seating areas there, but it's first time, first serve.
We found a place near the lazy river. Honestly, we just put our towels and snacks there and just went back there every now and then if we need it. We put our phone to water proof cases and brought it with us. Our wallet is in our lockers. We have money in our cashband if we need to buy anything.
If you like slides and big slides, do it first.
Well, Emma and Mike just did Riptide Racer and Rumble Falls. Later they realized they wanted to do the Eagle Hunt, so we did it the 2nd day.
There's plenty of place to buy food there, have your lunch there.
After lunch, do the Elkhorn Lazy river to relax. Although this is our favorite thing, so we did it even before lunch.
There's also a Polliwog park and Salmon Run for little kids. There's also a boulder beach bay for wave pool.
We stayed almost until 4pm at the wet park. By the way, this closes at 7pm.
2. Take the 5pm train ride and show.
The train ride and show from the main street is every hour and only about 35 minutes/ ride.
We planned to get the 7pm, but we noticed that people also like to take the train later and it gets busy, so we decided to take it earlier time.
We had dinner at Lindys. It was a beautiful restaurant. It's like a formal seat-in dinner with some options that is not only fries and hot dogs.
The rides at the dry park closes at 9pm but some of the stores in the Main Street closes at 9:30. So we took our sweet time with the rides, played some games in the arcade. Then by 9pm, we started heading back to the parking spot. We bought some caramel apples, took our stuffs in the locker and head back to our hotel.
Day 2
Come before 10 or 10am.
1. We get some coffee at the Victorian Cofee House. This is another beautiful cafe shop at the park.
2. When the park opens at 11am, go to the big rides (Coaster Alley) because the line goes so long there. We didn't do the roller coaster. But this morning, we did Thunder Canyon first, Log Fume and the Bumper Boats.
Then, we did the other small rides that we missed from the day before.
3. Around 2pm, we had lunch inside the Phantasm, where they also do the magic show.
4. After the magic show, we went back to the water pack to try the Eagle Hunt and lazy river.
You can skip going back to water park and just stay at the dry park.
There are also movie theater in the Main Street that shows old school movies. They also have a "mine" for the little one in the Critter Camp.
They have midway games and some retro arcade. We did those in both days.
Overall, I loved Silverwood. It's a lovely theme park. It was not something that I felt overwhelming. It's definitely a go to place if you're from Calgary because it's not too far from us.
Maybe on our next post, I can share some things we did other than Silverwood. We visited some places in Idaho and Spokane as well. I'll write more on that on our blog.
Check our vlog for the whole experience:
