Earlier this summer, my siblings plus Jimmy and I went to Canada’s Wonderland in Toronto. We rented a car, and left before 8:00 a.m.! Crazy, eh? Usually, our family leaves at least an hour and a half later than we plan. I think I’ll blame it on our parents. Or maybe I’m just more strict about it. Whatever the case may be, we left early.
We decided to eat breakfast on the road in order to leave Kingston sooner. The first service stop was McDonald’s. My brother decided to order the Big Breakfast. In previous years, this consisted of pancakes, eggs, sausages, and an English muffin on the side. At least, that’s what my dad always ordered. This time, however, it was pitiful.
It turned out to be a deconstructed Sausage Egg McMuffin with scrambled eggs but without the cheese.
See? Lame. It was a bad omen for the day.
When we finally got to Wonderland, we waited a ridiculously long time for Flight Deck (previously known as Top Gun). That sucked. I forgot to take off my visor and almost lost it on the first drop. The entire ride, I had to slam my head back into the seat to keep it from flying off my head. I did not enjoy it.
We took a quick break and sat down for some Blizzards at Dairy Queen because it was craaaaaaaazy hot outside. No pictures, but if you’ve had one before, it looks the same everywhere. My brothers ordered a chocolate chip cookie dough Blizzard, while Christine and I had an Oreo cookie one.
The soft-serve started to melt the moment the server handed it over the counter. If you order a Blizzard at the store, they’ll turn it upside-down for you. I don’t know what it’s supposed to prove, but if it falls out, they’ll make you a new one. I really wished they had turned it upside-down this time, haha. They would have had to make dozens of Blizzards. Even then, it was just too hot outside, and they would have melted anyways.
The second ride was Dragon Fire—a crazy looping, corkscrewing ride. I had a lot more fun on this one. This was the ride where Jimmy confirmed his fear of heights.
By the time we left Dragon Fire, it was almost 3:00 p.m. The heat was really intense. Not only that, it was crazy humid. We exited the ride and saw a water ride! Just the cure!
Here’s a picture of my brothers and me on Riptide. We were soaked head to toe. It was refreshing in the heat. (Sorry about the poor quality of the picture. Christine forgot that my camera doesn’t have any optical zoom. Dang, I really need a new camera.)
We walked around for a while after Riptide, trying to decide which ride to tackle next. I was getting hungry watching other visitors eat foot-long hotdogs. I just had to have one. Being a group of mature young adults, we took some pictures of it. Tee-hee. I would love to say that the extravagant price was worth it for the pictures, but let’s be honest here, $30 for hotdogs and drinks for five people is quite ridiculous.
After our overpriced lunch, we waited in line for the Behemoth, the newest addition to the park. The dark clouds started creeping in. You can kind of see it here. We waited in line for 15 minutes, and then it started to rain. The rides close down for at least an hour and half (or so we’ve heard) after the rain in order for the ride to dry off.
Rained out at 4:00 p.m., we decided that there was nothing left to do in the park. We drove about 20 minutes to get to our hotel, the Best Western Travel Inn Toronto Airport. After taking our showers, we headed to Chinatown for dinner.
We ended up at one of favourites, House of Gourmet yadda yadda yadda. I like it because their food is consistently good. I know some other people have had bad experiences there, but we really like it.
Jimmy ordered the Peking duck set meal. It comes with two courses of Peking duck, soup, and two dishes selected from a list.
Dinner started with one of hottest and sourest hot and sour soups I’ve ever had. It was so full of chili that I had to choke my way through it. That said, I enjoyed every throat-closing slurp. I don’t remember if everyone else liked it, but it has set a new standard of hot and sour awesome-ness for me.
Not long after they took away the soup, the server brought us the first course of Peking duck. Now, we knew that for the price of the set meal, we weren’t getting the best quality duck. I’m not sure if you can see it in the picture, but there were huge chunks of meat sliced off with the crispy skin. This isn’t supposed to happen. It was still good.
The first course always comes with crepes, shredded green onions, sliced cucumbers, and hoisin sauce.
One of the dishes we ordered as part of the set was spicy deep-fried seafood. It had all sorts of yummy ocean bits: shrimp, squid, and scallops. The scallops were the best, but they’re my favourite seafood. They always taste good to me.
You can see the duck’s second course in the background. It was stir-fried with ginger. Cooking the duck twice dried it out. There also wasn’t enough ginger to flavour the dish. It was forgettable.
The other set dish we chose was young pea shoots stir-fried with garlic. It was gooooooooood. The pea shoots have a clean, sweet taste. For some reason, this dish is always prepared with a lot of oil, even when my mum makes it at home. This was the only vegetal matter we ate all weekend. Kind of gross if you think of it like that.
Christine’s noodles are in the background. ‘Nuff said.
Christine assembled a small plate with all of our dishes. It looks quite delicious presented this way, doesn’t it?
And this is the damage. Crazy, eh? We left the second duck course alone, for the most part. We packed it up to be reinvented into a different, more delicious dish a few days later (sorry, there are no pictures of that).
I’d love to make some mockumentary on Asians someday. (Narrator voice) “As you can see here, their young must eat twice their body weight to sustain themselves.”
No joke, though. We do eat a lot.
After dinner, we wanted to get some bubble tea, but most of the places were closed (it was 10:00 p.m. by the time we left the restaurant). Alas, we left our bubble tea quest for another day.
And that concludes our little trip to Wonderland. We ate more the next day, but I forgot to take any pictures.
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