morose code

Carvill, able to score some cheap tickets thanks to work, and I went to Wonderland today. I love going to Wonderland. I love walking around, I love looking at rollercoasters, I love riding rollercoasters. I hate waiting in the rain for rollercoasters to start up again.

I'm horrible with learning people's names, especially when I first meet them, and when they're longer than four letters. So you'll have to excuse me when I say that we also went with Carley, Adam, Carvill's coworker who was taking her son whose name starts with a P, and her son's friend Nicolas.

To get things started off on the right foot, I left my house at 7:30 AM under ominously grey clouds to meet Carvill downtown at her condo. I was supposed to get there by 9 so we could meet everyone else at the Wonderland gates by 10, but, being used to taking the bus at 6 AM, I forgot that after sunrise there is a bit more traffic on the road. When I made it to the subway I had the luck of hanging around at Kennedy station for a a train then picking the one that went out of service at Chester. This meant that there was an entire subway train's worth of passengers standing on the platform trying to cram into the next, equally full subway train that came by ten minutes later. Taking the street car down Spadina meant letting the first three or four that would only go to King Street leave without me. Needless to say, I was late getting to the checkpoint.

Once we got into Carvill's automobile, however, we made excellent time. We left around a quarter to ten and made the trip in about twenty minutes. Adam was already there, as well as Mrs. Coworker and the kids. Carley showed up about five minutes after we spotted Adam. Making our way to into the park, Adam got stopped at the metal detector and I was refused entry because my ticket "was wrong."

My ticket, of course, was exactly the same as the ones Carvill and Carley had just used to get in. Having spent some time as a cashier, I know how frustrating it can be firsthand to scan something and have it tell you goddamn lies, as well as having a long line suddenly get longer and more unruly as time quickly goes by. Eventually a manager came by, rescanned it again and said nothing was wrong. Success! I received my backwards Jimmy Neutron stamp and we went into the park.

P. and Nicolas were quite energetic little guys and old hands at the park. They'd already been on every ride save the new Italian Job and were obviously planning to do so again. After every ride they would run as fast as they could to the next lineup. This, however, didn't last too long. We managed to hit up Top Gun!, Psyclone and Sledgehammer and were lining up for the Italian Job when P. didn't feel well. He and mom sat it out with Nicolas keeping them company.

The Italian Job was pretty fun. Unlike the last two where you just sit and spin around and up and down, it was a real rollercoaster. There are three minis and they drive around a track patterned after the movie's finale. There's a helicopter, explosions, a subway escape, the whole works. The ride is Fast, surprisingly so. The lineup Was Not. I'm not sure how long we were queued, but it was still a fun ride.

After that, Mom and the kids decided to go get something to eat and the rest of us headed over to the Mighty Canadian Mine Buster, a classic wooden coaster. There was no lineup at all, we just walked right up to the cars and got in. When we took it out, as soon as we started to climb the big hill it started to rain. Not really hard, but when we started going the droplets were ramming into my eyes at a good speed and stung. After the ride the rain only got worse. We met up with the kids and they decided to call it a day.

The four of us left went to get some food of our own, then Carvill declared that our next ride would be the Thunder Run, the only old ride she'd never been on. For those of you not in the know, Thunder Run basically circles the mountain in the middle of the park twice. Carvill seemed a little disappointed with her new favorite ride.

We eneded up going on the Bat, the "Wild Beast" (not the Wildebeast that we all remembered) and the Vortex before we decided to try White Water Canyon. It probably had the second longest line in the park. It consists of sitting strapped into a circular raft and floating down a river hoping you don't get caught in the surf and various waterfalls. It also seats six people, meaning that when we got in the wranglers sent two women over. I don't know why, but there was a gap between Carvill and Carley and I was elected to move and fill it so the ladies could sit side by side.

So off we go down the river. There were a few splashes and a few droplets from crashing down the river when all of a sudden our boat gets swamped and Carley gets drenched. I escape relatively unscathed until a hidden water cannon shoots a geyser in the air, then we bounce off a wall and I end up under a waterfall, then our raft gets swamped again. When we got off everyone was wet and Carley and I were soaking wet, head to toe. Everyone but the two ladies with whom I switched seats. They were bone dry.

Another part of the ride is the lookout points where other park visitors can drop a dollar and get three shots with the hidden geyser cannons on unsuspecting rafters. I took my revenge with no hesitation or compunction.

After that, Adam and Carley decided they had enough fun. Carvill and I elected to stay a bit more. Figuring we had nothing to lose at this point, we went on to Timberwolf Falls, in which you sit in a boat and head straight down into a lake, then under two waterfalls. Splash!

We ended up riding the Skyrider, Tomb Raider and Vortex, Top Gun! and the Bat again before we called it quits due to bad weather. The great thing about going on such a miserable day is that when it rains, tons of people leave the park and your lineups get shorter. On the downside, I was wearing various degrees of wet clothes for about eight hours straight.