Jeffrey S.
Yelp
This review is purely for the Christmas light boat cruise activity. I haven't done the ropes course and team building stuff here, so go with this in mind.
As the boat cruise goes. Um.. perhaps a narrative.
We were given a couple of tickets as a gift, so we wanted to make good on them. It's billed as a half hour boat ride with Christmas lights reflecting in the water and a visit from canoeing Santa. We arrived and checked in at the office, and there was a big tent with a fire outside, and inside they were selling hot dogs, scones and cocoa. The place was packed and it was a festive enough atmosphere.
We got on the 8:30 boat ride. The boat is kind of like the jungle boat ride in Disneyland, only without the roof overhead. At this point in the Provo River, you're right near Utah Lake and it's surrounded by big, tall trees and the water is somewhat shallow but the river wide and still.
They've run a rope above the river, and rather than use a motored boat, the young fella stands on the boat and pulls the boat along the river by tugging along the overhead cable. It's actually kind of cool, and I did prefer it to a loud motor with noxious fumes.
Total time in the boat was 16 minutes (I timed it after reading another review). You go up one way, come back, down the other way, and back to the dock. Santa rows up to the boat in a canoe (young, skinny Santa. No old dude is going to stand up in a canoe to high-five the kiddies and give out candy canes) and even though he was a little corny, the kids ate it up.
They said they had 14,000 lights strung. That's not as many as is sounds like. They could stand to put in 140,000 and you'd still feel like it was a little bare. They twinkled off of the water and looked pretty cool in that respect, but it ain't the lights that'll wow you.
Here's the real lowdown. If you live in Utah County and have little ones, this is a really, really terrific activity. The fire, the lights, the boat. They're going to be wowed, and it's not going to take you all night to have a little adventure. I wouldn't drive from far away for it, but it's going to be something the kiddies remember for a long time.
If you're looking for a date night, you're probably going to be better off looking elsewhere. If they were to invest some money in a ton more lights (and all that labor it takes to string them and unstring them), train the rope kids to be interactive, add some features, and jazz the thing up then you might have something. But you know what? I'm guessing they're not going to do that. And that's just fine. The ropes course is their bread and butter. This cruise thing is fine for the kiddies, and as long as they keep adding a new lighted deer or a few new LED lights, the kiddies will keep coming back.