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On March 8th, a few of us went to Snowplay (a tubing only snow resort). Its about 3 hours from Milpitas.
We reached around 9.30am. Plenty of parking was available. Our family took 4 tickets (1 Tow Up for 25$, 2 Walk up tickets for 15$, 1 child walk up for 9$). Tow-Up means that you can take use the Tow to take your tube up the hill. Walk-up means you have to walk up the hill. Kairavi and similar kids were not allowed the TowUp ticket since they are too young to get out by themselves once its time to offload from tow at top of the hill.
Please note that the walk up is not that difficult. And walking up is often faster than the tow to get up the hill. Only thing is that you can get a bit tired if you do it too many times.
The tubes that are available for walkup are the black tubes without any bottom. So you have to keep your bottom from touching the snow. For tow ups they have a fancier tube which has a bottom also and a handle to tow. This is more convenient. This fancier tube travels little bit faster than the black tube.
Dont worry if you have a walk up ticket. By noon plenty of these fancier colored towup tubes will be left here and there and you can pick up one of them. Its much easier to drag kids in these. Only thing is that if you have walkup ticket you cannot use the tow to go up. But you can drag this colored tube with you to the top.
For toddlers and kids they have 2 separate slopes also. This is much fun for the kids. You can take your own sled, saucer also and do sledding/etc on these junior slopes. The Kids did tubing on adult slopes as well as Kiddie Slopes and had fun on both.
We had taken tarps and made use of them to eat lunch on the snow. We did many creative things with the black tubes and colored tubes. We made a train of tubes, made a fortress of tubes, played bowling with tubes, etc. Other people were making stacks of tubes and then jumping on them :-).
The main slopes are quite nice and there are many of them. hence there is not much wait time to go down. Be careful though while sending kids down these slopes. Preferably there should be one family person down somewhere who would advise the kids to get off the slopes quickly. If the kids dont get off the slope quickly the next tuber coming down the slope can bang into them. This is true on kiddie hill too. Keep an eye out on kids since people are sliding here and there and its important to stay out of the way.
Overall it was a great experience and good fun. Snowplay is a good place for tubing and i have no problems recommending it.
Various Photo Albums are below:
1) Parikshit-Poonam Album (203)
2) Nitul-Swati Album (54)
3) Prashant-Dimple Album (47)
4) Nilesh-Vandana album
Website: http://www.snowplay.com
Nilesh-Vandana SnowPlay Album is here