Water parks are a vast improvement over old-fashioned dry parks, where children donned union suits and skidded face-first down slides parched by the summer sun. Enjoy the cooling qualities of water with today's Groupon: for $48, you get a season pass to Breakers Water Park in Marana (a $77.95 value).

To fulfill the challenging duty of equipping humans with a whole season of effective and thrilling water transport, Breakers Water Park offers a slippery slew of exciting and death-deriding rides and attractions. At the Bonzai Pipeline, a quintet of tubular fun gutters toss seated swimmers through curlicues and loops, while dual contortions at Splash Canyon channel children, adults, and freewheeling pieces of driftwood around curves and down straightaways faster than a wagon with warp drive. Although it plunges into untroubled waters, the Riptide’s 35-foot drop-off makes even the bravest slippery-slope sliders tremble. Meanwhile, Breakers Bay is a 1.3 million-gallon wave pool that bombards swimmers with constant swells of imported ocean motion concentrated into pool form. For wee ones, Captain Kidd’s Surfari is a lifeguard-supervised watertopia.

Breakers Water Park offers free parking, two food locations, and a first-aid station operated by a trained EMT or nurse. Slather your sun-seen parts with sunscreen and double-check the park’s schedule before heading off in the family hovercraft for a day of glissading, relaxing under giant shade umbrellas, and split-second moonwalks on water.

Reviews

Tucsonans give a "towels up" to Breakers Water Park with three Insider Pagers giving it four stars, and 10 Judy's Bookers giving it 3.2:

• I like to go to Breakers because of all the different water slides and the wave pool is really fun to play in. – Donnen H., Insider Pages
• Breakers Water Park is a great place to go durring [sic] the hot summers in southern Arizona, even for really young kids. – Ashley H., Judy's Book