Last day to book a discounted room.

Please note the last day to reserve a room at a discounted rate under our block is tomorrow. Please contact the hotel if you are attending this year and have not yet reserved your room.

 http://www.westinstonebriar.com

Registration for 2013 is now CLOSED.

KAZAPALOOZA REGISTRATION AND HOTEL ANNOUNCEMENT

We are excited to announce Kazapalooza 2013 will be held in Frisco, TX at the Westin Stonebriar.

Frisco is a northern suburb of Dallas with many great activities for our families.  While being located on the Dallas Tollway and Sam Rayburn Tollway allows easy access to anything in Dallas, Mid-Cities and Ft. Worth, we think you will find plenty to do within 3-4 miles of the hotel.  Anything 3 miles and under also will be accessible with the hotel shuttle by reservation. You will find that the Westin has a resort feel without the resort price.  We have access to a great pool, bocce court and putting green along with poolside dining.  Golf outings are available just a short walk across the lot….fees and reservations apply.  

Many plans are in the making! We will have dinner on the grounds Friday night and Brunch/raffle on Saturday with afternoon meet and greet with your region/s as well as lots of pool time and play time for all.  

To register click on the Registration tab on our blog.

A note about registration

While we wait for the reservations link from our hotel, we thought we would get some housekeeping details out of the way. Everyone is always asking how they can help us with such a large group. Here is your chance! We need a better system for organizing people and changing to a different way to register is the only way to do that at this point. So, we need you to fill out a registration form for every single person in your group. Yes, a pain and a bit more user un-friendly but the system that we have used for the last two years doesn’t make it planner friendly at all. So we need your help in taking these extra steps so we can best organize everyone for name tags, tickets, hotel numbers, etc. Thanks in advance! The new registration form will have a question asking family name/group identifier. This is a name that you can pick to use for every person you are registering whether family member, babysitter, grandparent, etc. The first and last name spaces will be for name on name tag but the group identifier will be the name we use to keep all of your party together on our spreadsheets. For example, Karen Floyd would register herself, her husband Glen Leggett, and her three little Leggetts and their family name could be Fleggetts or Floyd5 or whatever she decided and she would put that name on each of the forms that she fills out. If you use this identifier on every one of your people then you only have to fill out the address on one of the forms. Payment for registration will be via Paypal or check. You will need to add the individual fees and the t-shirt payment and submit payment. Reservations will be made separately thru the hotel website.

City Announcement

 Grab your cowboy hat and boots and get ready to ride your way into town…..what town you ask? Most of you have figured out that KAZAPALOOZA 2013 will be held in the DALLAS area. Yes, that’s right, Home of the Texas Rangers Baseball team, the Dallas Cowboys football team, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, the SMU Mustangs as well as the Dallas Stars Hockey team…… We searched long and hard and the Big D had the most to offer at the best price for our families. We are so excited about our venue and all the fun, food, activities, and shopping that will go on during the weekend. We hope to have registration up and running in the next few weeks as we finalize the contract and make sure the venue is ready to accept reservations from all of our families who are chomping at the bit to get a room and a ticket to the Lone Star state. So, a few clues to where we are NOT staying…..There will be no wolves howling, no “Gaylords” a leaping, no downtown abbeys or cowtown caravans; BUT, we leave you with a few of the great places you will be able to visit while you are in town! http://www.perotmuseum.org/ http://www.sixflags.com/overTexas/index.aspx http://www.legolanddiscoverycenter.com/dallasfw/ http://www.simon.com/mall/grapevine-mills/stores http://www.fortworthstockyards.org/ http://www.jfk.org/ http://www.trekaroo.com/places/dallas-fort-worth-texas/activities

A Note to our Families

Before we announce Kazapalooza 2013, we wanted to give you a snapshot of what goes into choosing a venue. As KP has grown each year, the blessings of meeting more and more families from all over the states and Canada have been amazing. Picking a suitable venue has become an incredible adventure and challenge. We as a group have a set weekend date, no corporate funds, and an unusually large amount of children. What a great problem to have! Having a set weekend limits our flexibility in choosing venues but we believe that being able to plan ahead each year is what our family’s desire most. Children activities and access to kid friendly places has to be high on the list also. Many conference centers have great pricing but cater to mostly business conferences (boring!) Pool size alone limits many places and some offer great room prices but 40,000 dollar food and beverage minimums. It is a fine balance we seek to maintain economics and good quality fun for all of our families. KP was created to establish lasting relationships for our children, raise money for the little ones still in Kazakhstan and have lots of fun doing both! These are lofty goals but goals we feel have been met by the last 5 years of Kazapalooza. Each year, we have succeeded in keeping costs at the lowest possible within our constraints. In addition, we have tried to improve on the things that did not quite work the year before based on comments/ feedback and trial and error. KP will probably never be perfect but rather perfect for us, the Kaz adoptive families, as long as community, bonding, and memory making remain our main goal along with raising funds for a charity. Texas definitely held up its end of the stereotype. Everything indeed seemed to be bigger, better, and with that, higher priced. We tried many scenarios with multiple venues, services, out of the box thinking, charter buses, and western themed towns. You name it, we researched it. Texas is big, people! We are very happy with the venue that we chose this year. It has a little of everything we like to offer. It is not where we originally thought we would be but apparently everyone else was going to be there too and they are going to pay big bucks to be there. Registration might look a little higher this year to account for higher food costs but room rates are lower so we are hoping that everything averages out to a workable budget amount for everyone. We are excited to announce that Kazapalooza 2013 will be just right for marvelous Mavericks, bright Stars, wild Mustangs, crazy Cowboys, and rowdy Rangers….sounds like a perfect place for a bunch of Kaz kids to us…..more details to come! Registration will begin in February! Your KP Planners