I had trusted there would be parking somewhere in Canada, and there was, but it took longer to find than I expected. We were aiming for the Clifton Hill area and ended up one block farther uphill and a couple south of that, in the parking lot of a theater that warned it was for patrons of this magician's show only. But a woman in a lawn chair was at the driveway, with a sign promising all-day parking for ten dollars and that seemed like the best and possibly legitimate deal. We gave her a US ten-dollar bill and she gave ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger back a twonie. When we returned a few hours later the price had gone up to C$20 for the day. bunnyhugger forgot to bring the twonie with us.
One important question was how long to spend there. The satellite navigator guessed we'd be home about 8:30, if we weren't stopped. For this, then, I suggested we could spend two or three hours, with my goal being that we might get home before midnight. This not so much because I figured midnight was especially important, but that I figured I would rather not be driving at 2 am after the many long days of driving and amusement-park-visiting and hot sun and even more driving. Midnight seemed more attainable.
We didn't have much of a plan for hanging out there, and just started down Clifton Hill, where I was amazed by how it seemed everyone in the world was there. This is about when it tumbled onto us that oh, yeah, the next day was Civic Holiday so it's a long weekend, and that may be why everybody was at Canada's Wonderland a couple days before. In the event; we weren't sure how much time we should spend inside the many fascinating and appealing midway attractions all along the road, given this. Most of what we did indoors was duck into the Great Canadian Midway arcade to use the bathrooms. I noticed that they did still have two pinball machines there, I think the same ones they had on our 2019 visit, Stern's 2013 Star Trek and a 1990s The Addams Family. We didn't play, I thought because bunnyhugger didn't want to stay in the packed room, and was startled when later she said she hadn't seen them.
Without quite a plan we ended up walking down to the cliff front, where we could see the Falls. And then we started walking south, along the promenade, looking down a lot, and across a good bit, and also sometimes at the crowd or at the handful of attractions up there. One that caught our fascination was a zip-line tower, giving quartets of people the chance to glide what sure seems like a dangerously long distance. It reminded us of some very silly word problems from her prealgebra course, last year, when they would ask for the slope of a zip line that dropped a thousand feet over a five-thousand-mile line or something similarly lethal.
We got farther along the promenade than we did last visit, seeing such curious sites as the former site of an overhanging rock that was a noteworthy attraction but was demolished as a safety measure. I'm not sure what the risk calculation there was. Also the plaque was unclear to me which side of the Niagara River had the spot; was it something that would have been right in front of us, or would it have been part of the panorama we were looking at across the way. But I'm the sort of person who can find something intolerably ambiguous about any text, however clear.
We ended up walking almost the whole way of the promenade, getting up past the actual falls, to where the river was at ground level. And this seemed like a very good place to stop our wanderings and duck inside the building there because we very much needed something cold to drink. It was another hot and blazingly sunny day, and we had to walk not just back along the promenade, but back up Clifton Hill, past its end.
Here's some hanging around the Medieval Fair of Canada's Wonderland a little more, now.
The, if we're honest, boring sign outside Dragon Fire specifying the ride's height requirements. Can't imagine what would be interesting about this picture until ...
Oooh, you see the ride queue has a new logo and, oh, it's spelled 'Dragon Fyre' here. I imagine Canada's Wonderland figures it only needs to replace the lower-importance signs when they wear out, and not just because they decided to medieval up (or down) the names of the coasters.
The acrobats and stunt show we watched while waiting for the Spinovator spinning-tubs ride.
Wire walker making their way over to the platform, over the concrete walking area below. They did a variety of stunts swinging around the wire and whatnot.
And made it safely to where they could push up the Windseeker ride tower!
Acrobats closing the show with some leaps off the tower. The one on the right owuld bounce off that little trampoline and out to the water, a heck of a stunt.
Trivia: An anonymous Greek text, the Periplus [Voyage], dating to the fifth century BCE, tells of a Carthaginian naval expedition lead by one Hanno, which after twelve days of sailing anchored at some spot close to a series of large mountains covered with aromatic trees, likely the Fouta-Djalon massif in Guinea-Bissau, on Africa's western shore. The expedition went further, to what appears to be the Niger delta, and on to the vicinity of Mount Cameroun before having to return for want of supplies. Source: Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles. (Nothing is recorded of the return voyage. There is a school of thought that Hanno managed to circumnavigate Africa, based on an assertion by Pliny, but, I mean, c'mon.)
Currently Reading: New Brunswick, New Jersey: The Decline and Revitalization of Urban America, David Listokin, Dorothea Berkhout, James W Hughes.
