#172. Defunctland (Saturday, August 19, 2000)

What was you best day…of going somewhere that doesn’t exist anymore?

It takes a special level of boredom and day-to-day ennui for a family of four in Ottawa to make the hour-long drive on a perfect summer day to middle-of-nowhere Renfrew to go visit a dinky, seven-exhibit “theme park” dedicated to children’s nursery rhymes. (And I’m being very generous with “exhibit” here; we’re talking plastic likeness of Humpty Dumpty on a wall with a slide next to it.)

And the summer of 2000 was exactly that. Right after two full years of my grandparents staying with us¹ and the family activities it inherently brought, it was now just my mom, my dad, my two-year-old brother, and I. We had no actual trips, we had no social engagements, at nine years old I was too young to think of using my summer vacation to aggressively prop up my college resumes… so the summer just happened—in the most inconsequential way a summer can happen.²

Not to disparage Storyland, of course. It was established by Dutch immigrants in 1966—five years before the much more famous storyland in Orlando (#94)—and was an extremely cute spot. The wooden gate at the front had a picture of a cartoon rabbit look as innocently happy as I’ve seen a cartoon rabbit look. And each of small exhibits was integrated into the surrounding woods—it was like you were exploring a fantasy forest and were rewarded for making these small treks with photo-ops with Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary and the Pied Piper of Hamelon.

I do not know how my mom found out about this place, or why we all agreed to go. But it was legitimately fun. We had no frame of reference for the dinkiness (Disney would be three years later). I was genuinely unfamiliar with some of the (oddly dark) nursery rhymes. They had a full mini-golf set-up at the end: where I recall making an impressive comeback against my dad (and taunting him for “blowing it” for the rest of this super-exciting summer). And they had a paddle boat you could rent for an hour to explore the lake, while this small, non-menacing mechanical shark head—whose mechanism of motion I never thought to question—casually followed your general direction (which I actually found quite ingenious).

But just one rare theme park experience wasn’t enough for a weekend. Because, on Sunday, we went to the much (relatively) much more known Ottawa SuperEx at Lansdowne Park (#90). It was one of those annual two-week summer agricultural fairs, with the full host of midway games and thrill rides of questionable robustness and safety, and had been running continuously since 1888.

This was the first time I dared to go on any of those rides (or any rides period). I was too chicken to go on the pharaoh-themed ride (which, if my nine-year-old memory serves, had production value comparable to those Disney rides), where you sat on this long boat-shaped vessel and it swung you back and forth to an alarmingly high elevation. But I did go on this other ride where you got strapped into this machine that was twirling around (super-descriptive I know). I recall that one vividly, because I was scared to death through the whole thing, while the absolutely legendary lyrics of Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip”—“I dip, you dip, I dip, you did, we dip” being the chorus—kept playing, and my dad down below raised his arm and loudly cheered my name every time I spun by.

But the whole day, the only thing I really wanted was to win one of those carnival games. And for hours and hours and hours, I kept failing. Whack-A-Mole, skee-ball, claw games, mini-basketball shooting games, games where you had to shoot a moving target with a water fun, this game where all you had to do was throw a ball into an unnaturally bouncy basket³ ten feet away.

But, finally, finally, around sunset when we were about to leave, I finally win one. It’s a bowling-like game where each player has to roll balls into these holes in front of them to cause their camel at the back to move—with certain holes labelled “Fast” and others “Slow”. I get my camel to the end first… before one other kid. Still, the prize I won, which was a small car doll⁴, was fully earned. And for the rest of the super-exciting summer, I reminded my brother about the “precious, precious car toy” I had won for him, at least three times each day.

(More impressively, though, two weeks later at the Hot Air Balloon Festival in Gatineau, I win a full fifteen-person version of the same race—beating what I recall were mostly adults. An underrated moment of success, which leads me to winning the much larger prize of a giant purple rat.⁵)⁶

The sad part about this weekend, looking back now, is that—as the name implies—neither of these two theme parks still exist. Both Storyland and The SuperEx shut down permanently in 2011, the SuperEx after an impressive 122-year run. To remain only as small, bright memories from a nine-year-old kid who had literally nothing better to do that summer.

My mom’s side for one year, my dad’s the next, with literally a one-day transition between them.
The only through-line, if any, was the Jays’ last semi-legit playoff run until 2014. In terms of time spent watching actually baseball, summer of 2000 may rival even the miraculous 2015 run.
Right after the operator explained the very simple rules, my mom was like “that’s too easy, there’s no point in that”, so to make her point, she just grabbed one of the balls in front of us (before we even played) and flung it into the basket—which caused it to bounce twenty feet back.
Not a car toy with wheels, an actual teddy bear-like object that was instead vaguely shaped like a car.
My mom was also apparently very dogmatic that carnival games prizes had to correlate with number of players. The next summer, at Central Island with visiting David Huang’s family in Toronto (#64), we come across a carnival game that gives the same prize no matter what. And my mom gets into a long argument with the operator about how that doesn’t make sense (and David and I don’t end up playing it).
That day, unfortunately, does not live on as positively in my memory, as the Jays lost a critical game versus the Athletics 10-0 that day, versus the day of the SuperEx where they beat the Twins 6-3.