Lake Travis Waterloo Adventures

Looking to get out of the house this summer? Maybe spend a day on Lake Travis that isn’t on a massive party barge? Enter Lake Travis Waterloo Adventures.

While I did receive free tickets to the obstacle course today, all honest thoughts and opinions are my own.

I’m someone who likes itineraries. I like to know ALL the details and maybe you’re like that too! So, here’s more Waterloo Adventure info than you’ll ever need:

First of all, you have to purchase tickets online. They have time slots for the obstacle course to ensure there aren’t a million people trying to go out all at once. What’s nice is you can see how many people have bought tickets for each time slot, so you can go when it’s not too crowded. Tickets are $54 a person, whether or not you do the water activities, so keep that in mind. Also, when you register for a time, you have to arrive 1 hour BEFORE that time to ensure you have time to get out to Lake Travis island location. I didn’t realize that when I picked a time, but luckily it wasn’t an issue for us.

When you arrive, you park at the Cypress Creek Marina (13987 FM 2769, Leander TX). Take everything you need with you – you cannot return to your car! A shuttle van will take you from the parking lot to the registration office (5-minute drive). In the registration office, you get a timed wrist band. After you’ve checked in and you have your wrist band, head down to the dock and catch a pontoon boat out to the Waterloo Adventure island. The boats run every 10 minutes or so and the ride to the obstacle course is only 5 minutes. All in all, it took us about 30 minutes to get from our car to the island. Easy!

We had about 30 minutes before our obstacle time slot, which was perfect. We had time to get our lockers (free!), use the restrooms (located in a trailer, but nice and clean), get our life jackets, and check out the small cantina.

5 minutes until our time, they called our group and gave us the safety speech. We were in the first group at 11am and there probably less than 30 people. It was awesome! There’s short little swim out to the course, then you have 45 minutes to run around. Trust me, 45 minutes is plenty of time – it’s exhausting! Pro tip: Get a waterproof camera! That’s how we were able to get all these fun photos.

The course has several different ways you can go, so if one obstacle is crowded with people, you can go another direction. There are monkey bars, a trampoline, slides, swings, ropes to climb up… all kinds of stuff. They suggest wearing water shoes and if you’re younger (must be at least 7), I’d highly recommend them. I didn’t have water shoes and I SLIPPED EVERYWHERE. Honestly, I thought it was funny to fall all over the place – to each their own. Brian had shoes and he was much more successful on the course.

As for difficulty level, you definitely need to be physically able. You must wear life jackets, but you must be able to swim. You need to be ok with falling down pretty hard and sliding around awkwardly. You also need to be ok with suddenly slipping into the lake. The course itself is super high quality! The inflatables were really smooth and I didn’t get any sort of scrapes or anything (and I fell about 50 times). When you fall into the lake, there are easy entry points on the obstacle course. I really appreciated being able to easily climb back onto the inflatables!

After 45 minutes (you can leave earlier if you want) they blow the whistle and everyone comes off the inflatables. You only have that one session on the obstacle course, but you can play on 4 other large inflatables for as long as you want. There are two huge climbing towers, a slide, and a trampoline. Those are untimed and you can stay out there until 7pm if you wanted! If you want another 45 minutes on the obstacle course, you can purchase another session for $10. One session was enough for us, so we grabbed some beers from the cantina, swam to a floating table, and chilled for a bit. It was wonderful!

After a beer, we grabbed some lounge chairs under an umbrella and bought another round. We ordered some pizza rolls from The Tipsy Pizza, a food truck on the island, and just hung out. Overall, I was pretty impressed with the environment. It’s very nice and clean, all the employees we talked to were super nice, and there was plenty of seating. We went on a Friday from 11am – 2pm and there were never more than 200 people on the island, I’d guess. It was NOT very crowded at all, which was really wonderful.

Waterloo Adventures markets this as a beautiful day on their private beach on Lake Travis. Honestly, it did all feel pretty luxurious except for ONE thing – they need better food and drinks. The only option for food was the pizza roll truck (it was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but that was all). The drinks are simple – canned beers, Dos Equis, Shiner, the usual. I was totally ready to be super extra and order a big old pina colada complete with a flower on top, but they didn’t have anything like that. Even better, what if they added a larger menu with servers that came to your lounge chairs? Now THAT is luxury. The $54 also seems a bit steep, but if you planned on camping out the whole day there (I saw a group of people playing Heads Up on their phone), then it’s more worth it to me.

Have you been out to the Waterloo Adventures obstacle course? What else do you like to do on Lake Travis? Should I try the Zip Lines next??