Our family recently visited ontario place, just after it opened for the 2011 summer season. Having enjoyed visits there last year, we purchased a seasons pass before getting there. This was not a good idea.

The problem is that we didn’t know exactly what we were getting. We assumed that all the attractions there last year would be there now, and maybe then some. This was not so. Eric’s favorite, the one-of-a-kind H2O Generation Station climber was simply gone. On some maps and guide signs inside the park, ghosts of the structure were still present. There was even staff posted at the demolition site, with no duty except to divert crying children from the area. Eric was inconsolable for a time.

How one would find out what’s still there and what’s not? Other parts have also been summarily demolished or blacked out or turned off. The park’s web site seems carefully crafted as an exhaustive list of what’s there today. The prospective park visitor must thus become a detective. If it’s not on the web site today, if it hasn’t been observed in person, don’t expect it to still exist. If you’re disappointed in such treatment of loyal/naive customers, complain.

UPDATE: A customer service lady from Ontario Place kindly apologized, and will consider posting attraction shutdowns on their web site.

I am at this time prepared to apologize to those readers who misinterpreted my periodic discussions of traffic rules, butter policies, and bird fantasies as subliminally signalling something. I am sorry, I never meant to mislead.

For the record, I am not – I repeat not – a lesbian civil rights activist in Syria. Nor a “40-year old graduate student”, whatever that is.