Wisconsin Dells: The Whitest Place in America?
It’s the last day of our trip to the Wisconsin Dells. For the uninitiated (that is, anyone not from the Midwest) the Dells is basically the place you would beg your parents to take you as a kid, due to summer daytime tv ads showing other kids splashing around, having lots of fun, while the best thing you’ve got going is the neighbor with a fancy sprinkler. It’s about five hours from Chicago, so most likely you never got to (or, at best, not that often) and instead, you made do with running through that sprinkler. If you were really lucky, someone got a slip ‘n’ slide.
Here they put that sprinkler to shame. Not only do they have the world’s largest water park resort, but they go so far as to declare themselves the world capitol of water parks.
Now you might be wondering how or why does one visit a water park in winter? Although, if you’re from California, that thought never crossed your mind, but now that I’ve put it there, you too are wondering “Yeah… actually, how do you visit a water park when the temperature is is below freezing?”
Well, the crazy fuckers have even gone so far as to put parks indoors. Big ones. The one we’re at is 350,000 square feet of water park and that’s just one of forty. That, my friends, is some serious dedication to water slides.
And here all you thought Wisconsin had was cheese, cheap beer & cigarettes and 10 electoral votes.
This is our 3rd day, our final day. Despite some really cool rides, past adolescence, there’s only so much splashing around you can take. Instead, being a grinch-nerd, I’m hunkering down nice & dry with my laptop & the free-but-flakey wireless in the lobby.
After being here a few minutes I started to notice something: everyone is white. And I don’t mean most, I mean all. Everyone. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone of another race. Turning around to survey down into the pool area, a quick scan of some 100 people and nothing but white people.
No hispanics. No asians. No blacks. No nothing. Just white people. This is fucking David Dukes wet dream. (No pun intended.)
I decided to start my own demographic survey. After all the the lobby is fairly busy, with a lot of people coming & going. I’m at 103 so far, 100% white. That’s 2.44% higher than the 97.56% stat listed on the wikipedia page.
This is fucked up.
UPDATE: After 229 white people, an asian family of 7!
Diversity, at last.
December 30th, 2005 at 5:14 pm
So, are you saying that only white people are dumb enuff to want to swim in the winter??
January 1st, 2006 at 2:39 pm
That’s what the data seems to point at!
February 1st, 2010 at 2:02 am
LOL – the Dells has a pretty diverse visitor base. I’ve lived here for a couple of years, moving from Chicago, and found it to be a very diverse place. This is both from the tourist and local perspective.