Funtown Splashtown USA, Saco: A Visitor's Guide

What it is and where it is

Funtown Splashtown USA is an amusement park and water park on Portland Road — Route 1 — in Saco, in southern Maine's beach belt. It is a few minutes inland from Old Orchard Beach, about twenty minutes south of Portland, and directly reachable from I-95 with no coastal traffic to fight if you time it right.

The two parks share a site and a gate but are laid out as distinct halves. Funtown is the dry side: a wooden roller coaster, a log flume, a drop tower, go-karts, spinning flat rides and a substantial section scaled down for small children. Splashtown is the water park: slides, tube rides, a wave feature and a shallow play area. Admission is sold either for a single side or as a combination ticket covering both, and current pricing and operating calendar live on the park's own site — check there rather than a listings aggregator, because the schedule shifts with the season and the weather.

It is a regional park, not a national destination, and it is honest to say so. A family can cover both sides comfortably in one long day. That is a feature if you are passing through and a limitation if you were expecting a multi-day resort.

How to plan the day

A few things about this park reward planning rather than improvisation:

• The season is short and weather-dependent. The park runs weekends in the shoulder months and daily through the core of summer, closing in early fall. The water park side is the more fragile of the two — a cool, gray Maine day makes Splashtown miserable even when it is technically open.
• Buy the right ticket. If anyone in your group is not riding, or if you know you only want one side, the combo ticket is money spent on nothing. Decide before the window.
• Height rules govern everything. If you are traveling with a child near a threshold, measure at home. It changes which ticket makes sense and which side of the park you spend the afternoon on.
• Do Splashtown in the heat of the day. The dry rides are more pleasant in the morning and again in the last two hours; the water side is at its best between roughly noon and four, which is also when the dry-side queues are longest. Splitting the day this way is the single most useful trick here.
• Weekdays beat weekends by a wide margin, and the day after a washout is usually the busiest of the week as everyone reschedules at once.

Bring swimwear worn under clothes, a towel per person, and something for wet gear on the ride home. Sun exposure on the water side is significant — there is shade, but not enough of it for a full afternoon.

The context nobody puts in a listing

Funtown did not arrive fully formed. It grew out of a small roadside attraction on Route 1 in the 1960s, in the era when this stretch of highway was the main artery carrying summer traffic from Boston to the Maine coast before the interstate took that job away. Every mile of it sprouted motels, mini-golf, lobster shacks and go-kart tracks aimed at a car full of people who had been driving for three hours and needed a reason to stop.

Almost all of that is gone now. What makes this corner of Saco unusual is that a meaningful amount of it survived: the amusement park expanded instead of closing, the water park was added alongside it, and ten minutes away the amusement pier at Old Orchard Beach kept operating as one of the last oceanfront midways in New England. Together they are the largest surviving cluster of mid-century family roadside attractions in the region.

The park has also stayed independent. It never got absorbed into one of the chains that swallowed most American regional parks, and it is still run by the family that built it. That shows up in small ways — the landscaping, the fact that the kiddie section is genuinely large rather than an afterthought, the absence of a corporate upsell at every turn. It also shows up in the scale, which is modest by chain standards. Both are the same fact.

One more piece of local context worth knowing: the Route 1 strip immediately outside the gate is Saco's "Auto Mile," and it is the reason traffic on this road behaves the way it does. Getting out of the park at closing on a Saturday means merging into that. Leaving twenty minutes before the gate closes, or half an hour after, avoids most of it.

What else is close by

Most people build a beach day around the park rather than the other way round. These are all real, well-reviewed stops within a short drive:

• Ferry Beach State Park, 95 Bayview Rd, Saco — 4.7 from 757 reviews. Wide sand, dune boardwalks and a rare inland tupelo swamp behind the beach. See our Ferry Beach State Park guide.
• Saco Heath Preserve, 163 Buxton Rd — 4.8 from 366 reviews. A boardwalk across a raised peat bog, about two minutes from the park and almost always quiet.
• Rapid Ray's, 189 Main St, Saco — 4.6 from 1,035 reviews. A stand-up counter that has been feeding Saco fast and cheap for generations.
• Sea Salt Lobster, 660 Main St, Saco — 4.3 from 2,225 reviews, the highest review volume of any restaurant in town.
• Palace Diner, 18 Franklin St, Biddeford — 4.7 from 1,196 reviews. A restored dining car across the river in Biddeford, and one of the best breakfasts in southern Maine.
• Old Orchard Pier, Old Orchard Beach — 4.5 from 581 reviews. The pier and the amusement area behind it, seven minutes east.
• Maine Classic Car Museum, 2564 Portland Rd, Arundel — 4.9 from 321 reviews, and a good rainy-day substitute if the park is a washout.

For a fuller list of what fills the rest of a Saco day, see things to do in Saco; for the beach town next door, the Old Orchard Beach guide.

Frequently asked questions

Do you need separate tickets for Funtown and Splashtown?

The two parks share one entrance but are ticketed separately, with a combination admission covering both. If your group is only interested in one side, the single-park ticket is the better buy. Current prices and any non-rider or late-entry options are published on the park's own website, which is the only source worth trusting for them.

How long does it take to do Funtown Splashtown?

A full day covers both sides comfortably for most families. If you are only doing one park, half a day is realistic, especially on a weekday. Plan on the water side taking longer than you expect, because changing, drying and re-applying sunscreen eats an hour you did not budget for.

When is Funtown Splashtown open?

It is a seasonal park: weekends in the spring and early fall shoulder, daily through the heart of summer, closed in winter. The water park side operates on a shorter calendar than the ride side. Because the schedule is weather-sensitive and changes year to year, check the park's site the morning you plan to go rather than relying on a cached listing.

Is Funtown Splashtown good for toddlers and small children?

Yes — the section built for small children is one of the park's stronger points and is larger than the equivalent at most regional parks. The constraint is height limits on the bigger rides, so a family with a wide age range will need to split up for part of the day. Measure your child before you go and check the posted requirements, which decide more about your day here than anything else.