Water fun in New Braunfels

July 27, 9:30 PMSan Antonio Grandparenting ExaminerCynthia Riffe

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It's hot in Texas.  If one is looking for a place to cool off, a short jaunt north on IH 35 from San Antonio would do the trick. The growing community of New Braunfels, richly steeped in German tradition, is abundant with innumerable water-based recreational opportunities wherein thousands upon thousands of sun-and-fun seeking tourists find their way at the beginning of each summer and then disappear just as quickly after Labor Day.

For the local folk, water sports are an expected part of day-to-day living. Lifelong residents recount fondly the many days of their youth spent boating at Canyon Lake, tubing on the Guadalupe River, or splashing around in the spring-fed pool at Landa Park. (Many affectionately recollect “Stinky Falls”, now better known as the Comal River tube shoot.) Younger residents were privileged to have grown up spending summer days with mom and dad at Schlitterbahn, one of the most highly developed and popular waterpark destinations in the country.

So, for the ever-growing number of grandparents who find themselves as grandparent-guardians of young children, the thought of keeping up with their young wards in the many and varied water activities can be daunting, to say the least. It is easy to avoid this situation altogether until the day the grandparent-guardian realizes that his or her wards are the only amongst their peers who have not yet learned to swim.

Had these youngsters been reared as nature intended, by young parents not yet enlightened to (or respectfully fearful of) the dangers of skin cancer, they may have come by this life lesson quite naturally. But pale-skinned, “soft and huggable” grandparents who rarely make their way into swimsuits, or out into the glaring heat of the Texas sun, must find a way to compensate.

With this plethora of public swimming venues in New Braunfels, there will come a day of abandon when the children will opt to take a cool dip (assuming their peers can pry their white knuckles off the rail or tree found onshore). If sensing this day in the not to distant future, a grandparent would be wise to contact the New Braunfels Parks & Recreation Department (PARD) to find reasonably priced swim lessons to prepare the wards for this inevitable right of passage.

It’s hot in Texas. From beneath the umbrella poolside at the Olympic pool in Landa Park, grandparent-parents smile, nod, and raise their water bottles to the panic stricken faces of their little wards as they are coaxed into the water by the young, tanned swim instructors who so effortlessly wear their swimsuits like a second skin. They reason that perhaps these youngsters will survive having a senior mom and pop after all. And, if not, at least they will survive their first of many cool watery adventures.