Blue Bayou Water Park — Attraction in Prairieville

Blue Bayou needs to be shut down.

Omg where do I start?

Walk in the gate, “ma’am we can’t let you in there’s lightening.” I look around, not even raining. “Oh never mind, we can let you in but if we have to shut down you’ll get a rain check voucher.” 🙄

Go to bag check. Young guy tells me to take my watch, glasses etc off so I can go through the metal detector. Young girl tells me “don’t listen to him, he’s new. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” My husband set the metal detector off 4 times, finally he was waved through after zero further check 👀

Get a locker. Get to an area to park our stuff. Place is visibly worn and out of date. Half the rides are out of order. Fine, I don't plan to get on those roller coasters anyway. They tell us we can’t get in the pool because there’s lightening. Again, it’s not raining. So my fellow mom and I say, let’s get drinks and food for the kids because it’s hot. All the concessions stands nearby are closed. Walk around to try to find somewhere. Ask the staff “hey where can I get waters.” All I get are should shrugs and idks.

I find Guest Services to complain. Going to the office it smells like cat urine. Talk to the lady about my complaints. I inquired about the lightening policy, she told me that she wasn't sure on the radius of the strikes but that insurance prevents them from allowing anyone in the water in the event of lightening within the range. She make sure to let me know that they do not give refunds, but she explains to me where we can go and get pizza and water. So me and my fellow mom find the location to go get some drinks and something to eat the first place we go. My friend wants to get her daughter a smoothie. The lady serves her a half full cup, my friend asks her are you charging me full price for a half filled smoothie? In all seriousness, the girl responds back "well they used to cost more than this." I order the sodas and the pizzas. They barely had any stock. They had one lady behind the area taking orders 45 minutes later I managed to get two cokes, three sprites, two bottles of water and two pizzas.

Luckily by that point they had opened up the pool and the slides again so we head to the lazy river. The water level is low.  The water didn't even cover my butt standing, but that’s fine. We go to the wave pool. Immediately I start to get skin irritation, assuming from the strength of the chemicals. The water level there also seems low. The kids see a waterslide where it’s one of those that you lay on your stomach and you get on the mat and you slide down. Absolutely no direction from the lifeguard at the top, everyone just slides down when they feel like it. I make it to the bottom and get up to check on my 6-yr old son. Before he has even cleared the slide, I see that there is another batch of people coming down already. I am panicking, screaming, running towards him trying to get him out-of-the-way before this next person sliding down (who is bigger and is going to go farther) runs my child over, I finally get my son out of the way. I look up the lifeguard that is at the top is literally sitting down not giving anybody any direction not giving anybody any guidance so I start screaming at the lifeguard at the ground level with me like what the ** are y’all doing? What are you looking at? How the hell do you still have people that are like on the mat at the bottom and you’re still letting them slide???? He attempts to whistle and flap his umbrella to get the attention of the life guard at the top--who NEVER ONCE LOOKED UP OFF OF HIS PHONE.

So at this point, we were not sliding any more slides. We let the kids finish their time in the children's area until bad weather started moving in. We hastily exited the park amid flying table umbrellas and a noticeable lack of staff.

Do not visit. It's only a matter of time before they either close or experience a serious injury that...

We are currently leaving the park after spending the entire day and I can honestly say I am APPALLED at our experience. We prepaid for our tickets which cost $20 extra, a total of $120. Tickets at the door are $100 (with a coke can). I was under the impression that because we were pre-purchasing tickets for a higher price, there would be a separate entrance but there was not. We paid extra money for our tickets for literally no reason and still waited in line behind everyone else buying tickets.

They do not allow you to bring water into the park and then charge crazy amounts for bottled water which is insane in the Louisiana heat. I bought a bottle of water and asked for a cup of ice and I was charged the full price of a drink for the cup of ice. I paid 7 dollars for a bottle of water, a cup of ice and a 12 oz fountain drink.

My partner's flip-flop broke while we were in the park and he got a blister/burn on one of his feet when he stepped on a really hot spot on the cement (obviously not their fault at all). When we got to the bottom of one of the rides, he sat off to the side of the little pool of water with his foot in the water (because the cement was too hot to walk on) while I ran back to our locker to grab his one intact flip flop to protect his LITERALLY BLISTERED/BURNED FOOT. The life guard working the ride was super sweet and asked if she could do anything for his foot. A literal angel. A supervisor walked past him and started waving his arms like a lunatic, yelling at him to leave so he had to get up and walk across the scorching concrete with his already blistered foot. The supervisor was the rudest, most self important person I have ever experienced in my life. It was giving "the hall monitor episode of spongebob". I wish him the absolute worst.

All of the big rides closed. Half of them were closed when we got there, the rest closed while we were there. We waited in line for about an hour and the ride shut down right when we got to the top. The fact that all the major attractions were closed and they don't offer partial refunds is WILD. I couldn't even do what I paid money to do. You can stick your lazy river where the sun don't shine:)

The scarest thing that happened? One of the rides we went down had no life guard or staff on duty and was just open for the public to casually walk up. I slid down thinking that it was normal for that ride. The slide was so intense, I busted my elbow open and inhaled a ton of water at the bottom. Maybe, just maybe, if a staff member had been on duty, I could have known what to expect so I didn't injure myself. When I asked the life guard at the bottom of the ride if the top was supposed to be staffed, he told me that it was likely that the staff member left out of anger because staff members are supposed to be relieved every 30 minutes and he had been stuck up there for over 2 hours. The staff are expected to sit on top of hot towers, in Louisiana summer heat without adequate relief and its at the expense of the safety of the guests and the staff.

Also, the park doesn't sell sunscreen. Not really "bad" but it is weird.

In conclusion, they overcharge, under deliver, treat the staff poorly, have little "member" energy and care far more about money than the safety and well-being of the...

As much as I really -REALLY- want to give this place more stars, I just can't. In good conscious, I just have to tell folks to be careful about this place.

I went for the first time with a buddy of mine. As much fun as I thought we'd have, there wasn't much fun to be had at all.

Long story short, I almost drowned. I felt like I got into a car crash. Left with some serious neck and head pains.

The detailed version...

First, we got on this water slide called the angry moccasins or something like that. It's a pair of black slides with snake heads on them. You go so fast on this slide, you literally can not lift your head or even breathe because the g-forces pushing down on you on all the turns you make at such a fast speed. At the end, it's a huuuge rush of water that dumps you in a pool. It's so disorienting and dizzying, it left me tumbling under water and unable to surface. I swallowed so much water and tried desperately to get out. A lifeguard had to help me out. I sat on the floor, puking up water and trying to catch my breath for a good 30 minutes. I was in shock, I seriously thought I was going to drown.

We got on the Water Racer slide, it's a slide where you take a slide mat up to the top of this really long slide that has a few hills on it. When I went down, my body lift off the slide on the last few hills since I was going so fast. My knee burned and scraped on a rough patching on the slide when I came down and land hard at the bottom. My whole front and back were in pain. =/

We figured we had enough of the water park after the near-death experience, so we decided to go to the dry theme park area where they have all the carnival rides.

They have this big looping roller coaster, "Ragin Cajun" I think it's called. That ride is SOOO unbelievably bumpy, it thrashes you around like a rag doll in the seats and knocks your head from side to side between the safety harness. It goes up a second hill and when it comes to a sudden halt, it seriously feels like you've just been rear ended. When I got off, my head and neck were in some serious pain. I couldn't ride anything the rest of the time and we wound up leaving.

These rides seem very old and out dated and are probably not safe at all, especially if they're giving guests whiplash and nearly drowning them, as well as leaving them with bumps, bruises, scrapes, and burns. The park seems to be run by a lot of teens and college students who don't really seem to be taking their job, and the safety of others, very seriously. My body can take a beating. I've been on some pretty brutal rides in the past, but this place seriously takes the cake. The smaller rides (like the black widow, rainbow, swinging ship, tilt-a-whirl) were fun, but that's because they're small and they don't do a whole lot. The bigger rides were the ones that really messed me up.

Like I said, I really wanted to give this place more stars because i'm a huge fan of amusement parks and the like, but this place was just so brutal and not very well maintained, I'm steering as far away from it as I can and making sure to warn my friends/family of the place. If you really want to go, go at your own risk and please be...