Not All Kingdoms are Created Equal

I had such a good experience at the Kingdom of Bounce located near Easton that I was super excited to find out that another one had opened up a little bit closer to our house, and that it had open bounce hours on the weekend, so that we could take Kevin with us. Kevin needed to see what all the fuss was about.

Connor asked me every day this week if it was Saturday yet, and if we could go to the Kingdom of Bounce with Daddy yet. Finally, Saturday came.

Before heading over to the new Kingdom of Bounce, I checked the rates online. I found that we would be paying $10 to get in, which is the same price for two kids at the other place. That was fine.

However, when we got to the actual location, I found out that the $10 admission price would only cover two hours in the facility, instead of all day (like the other one). I figured that this was okay, as the boys would probably be ready to go after two hours any ways.

But then, we found that the facility itself was muchmuchmuch smaller than the other one, and there were about 1/3 as many bouncy houses, all crammed into the tiny space. I couldn't walk around any of them to see into the windows to see what was going on the way that I could at the other facility. And there was a strict no parents allowed in the bouncy houses policy.

And the bouncy houses were in terrible condition. Many were ripped and blowing air all over and missing hand holds and such. Some had clearly been repaired, and the repair patches were falling off again.

Then there was the staff. They were just obnoxious. To us. Not to the parents who were ignoring their 12 year olds who were being obnoxious. Not to the said obnoxious kids. To us. Because we were trying to be involved in what our kids were doing and were watching them closely.

We sat down at a table for a quick juice box break, and not one, but two staff people told us that we had to leave that table. It was not marked as being reserved, but apparently it was a table that was only used for parties. And one of the workers told us that she knew that we couldn't use the table because they didn't have any parties booked that day! What?! So we asked where we *could* sit, and were totally blown off. So we kept sitting there until the juice boxes were done.

Then, the final straw, was when a worker told me to stay off the bouncy houses when I went in to rescue Connor from being trampled by a set of large boys. He was stuck, he was crying, he was being hurt, and I had to go in to get him. The worker came right over to me and informed me that I *really had to stay off* the bouncy houses. Whatever. I'm sure that I was doing much less damage by carefully climbing onto the house to extract my small child than the obese-and-pretending-to-be-younger-than-twelve-years-old gang of rowdy boys. Seriously, I weigh less than most of them anyways.

And what was I supposed to do? Leave him in there? He already had a huge lump on his forehead and no one was stopping to help him up...in fact, he was being stepped on and stampeded!

I understand that bigger kids can be rough, and I understand that being a weekend they would be there, but I don't understand why the staff would be so rude to me. Not only did she come over to inform me that I was breaking the rules, but she was very rude and disrespectful to us.

In fact, the experience was so bad that we left after 40 minutes, and I almost stopped to ask for our money back - but I decided that it wasn't worth the effort of dealing with the most unpleasant staff I have encountered lately.

It was so bad that I might not even go back to the "good" Kingdom of Bounce. Seriously.