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

What was your 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 generous with ‘exhibit’; we’re talking a plastic Humpty Dumpty on a wall with a slide beside it.)

And the summer of 2000 was exactly that. After two straight years of grandparents staying with us,¹ it was suddenly just my parents, my two-year-old brother, and me. We had no real trips, no social engagements, and at nine I was still too young to weaponize summer vacation for future applications. So the summer just happened, in the most inconsequential way a summer can happen.²

Storyland itself was genuinely charming. Founded by Dutch immigrants in 1966, it tucked its little nursery-rhyme displays into the surrounding woods, so wandering between them felt like exploring a fantasy forest. The front gate featured an almost offensively cheerful cartoon rabbit, and I was genuinely unfamiliar with several of the darker nursery rhymes.

They also had mini-golf, where I made a comeback against my dad and taunted him for “blowing it” for the rest of the summer, plus paddle boats on a small lake patrolled by a harmless mechanical shark head that somehow followed you around.

But just one rare theme park experience wasn’t enough for a weekend. Because, on Sunday, we went to the much better-known Ottawa SuperEx at Lansdowne Park (#94). It was the city’s summer fair, who had been running since 1888, full of midway games and thrill rides of questionable structural integrity.

This was the first time I dared to go on any of those rides. I was too chicken to go on the pharaoh-themed ride, 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 another ride where I was strapped into some rotating contraption. I endured three minutes of terror while the legendary chorus of Freak Nasty’s “Da Dip”—“I dip, you dip, I dip, you dip, we dip”—kept playing, and my dad down below raised his arm and loudly cheered my name every time I spun by.

What I really wanted, though, was to win something. For hours I failed at Whack-A-Mole, skee-ball, water-gun races, and this game where all you had to do was throw a ball into an unnaturally bouncy bin ten feet away.³

Finally, around sunset, I won one: a camel-racing game where rolling balls into different holes moved your camel down a track. I beat exactly one other kid, but a win was a win. My prize was a small stuffed object vaguely shaped like a car, which I immediately elevated into the “precious, precious car toy” I had won for my brother and reminded him about several times a day for the rest of the summer.⁴

The sad part, looking back, is that neither place exists anymore. Storyland and the SuperEx both closed permanently in 2011, the latter after a 122-year run. They survive for me only as two small, bright memories from a nine-year-old 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 one real through-line was the Jays’ last semi-legitimate playoff push before 2015 (#97). In raw hours watched, summer 2000 may actually rival that later run.
Right after the operator explained the rules, my mom declared it “too easy,” grabbed a ball before we’d even paid, and flung it into the basket. It bounced about twenty feet back. Point made.
Two weeks later, at the Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival, I somehow won a full fifteen-person version of the same race and upgraded to a giant purple rat. That Balloon Festival day survives less fondly because the Jays lost 10–0 to Oakland; on SuperEx day, they beat Minnesota 6–3.