Friday, July 11th, 2008
After getting back to our car, we took the long way up to Niagara-on-the-Lake to have dinner at the Olde Angel Inn.
Kevin had been here multiple times, but it was my first time. The whole area was very cute, and was a stark contrast to all the neon and kitsch of Niagara Falls. The inside of the restaurant had low ceilings, and was covered in nautical memorabilia and photos. For my dinner, I had a chicken pasta with an alfredo type sauce with artichokes. It was great...the chicken was almost shaved, and was different than any chicken in a pasta dish I'd ever seen, but it tasted great. I also opted for some buschetta...mmmm. I didn't finish all of my pasta, so I packed up the rest and planned on eating it for breakfast the next morning.
After dinner we went back to Niagara Falls and dropped off my food at the hotel. Since we had a few extra minutes, we went to...
...Value Village!!! But the trip wasn't nearly as good as I'd hoped. I only ended up buying a nutcracker cookie jar for my mom, and nothing for myself. Everything seemed to be really expensive, with most of the nicer womens shirts running between $7-10. That's just too much to pay for second hand clothes in a thrift store. Maybe when I got $1 Canadian for $.60US, these prices seemed like a better bargain. But with the dollars being basically equal at the time of the trip, I found them to be too expensive. Oh well.
We still had the entire evening to kill, so we decided to go back to Clifton Hill and get one of their Fun Passes, which was $30 and gave you admission to six attractions plus some arcade tokens. Both sides of the street have their own type of pass, but the side with the Niagara Sky Wheel seemed to include better attractions than the other side, so that was where we went.
The Niagara Skywheel at dusk
The Niagara Skywheel, a little later that night
Our first stop was the Niagara Skywheel, which was new since my last trip to the area. The wheel alone was $10, which made the pass seem all that much better of a deal. Each cabin has its own AC controls, and supposedly has anti-glare glass (but I still ended up with plenty of glares on the photos I took). We got three complete revolutions of the wheel, not including the loading and unloading revolutions. It was a great way to get a view of the area at night.
The next stop we made was at the Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars.
A wax man taking a photo of a wax woman. And of course, as soon as you walk between them, his flash goes off!
This was a fairly standard wax museum, and most of the figures looked fairly well like the people they were supposed to be. They did have a lot of the names intentionally spelled wrong, which was confusing...like "Bette Middlar." Not sure what's up with that!
Kevin takes skyscraper terrorizing lessons from King Kong
I found the Snow White display to be kinda creepy, even if it did include a game where you tried to name each dwarf
It was there...I had to do it!
Kevin has a moment with Madonna. What did you say to make her give you that look, huh?
After we were done in the wax museum, we went over to the Great Canadian Midway.
We had three things that we could do here, so we did the FX Ride Theater first. I really don't like simulators like this since they tend to give me headaches, but I rode it anyway. The preshow was shown on three monitors stuck inside a creepy, demented clown's mouth, and repeated itself about every minute or so. I don't even remember anything about the ride, except for a comment I made about my restraint. I had no restraint at all in front of my seat, but when the ride started, the restraint that covered the rest of the row miraculously grew about 12 inches longer to cover my lap. You can predict what kind of off color comment I made, which made Kevin laugh, and made everyone else look around at us! Then on the way out, this scary clown head popped out of a giant jack in the box, complete with cackling noises and strobe lights. Random.
After the ride, we decided to get our arcade tokens so I could give my head a moment to compose itself. We played a couple of games of skeeball, then split up to find the higher ticket yielding games. I played mine in some "roll the token down the ramp and make it go through a hole in a rotating drum" game. I did fairly well, and managed to come away with a handful of tickets! The line to redeem the tickets was HUGE, so we cashed in our tickets for a voucher, then headed for the Ghost Blasters dark ride.
Ghost Blasters was a cute Sally dark ride. Not sure that I would pay the stand-alone price of $5 for it, but I enjoyed it since it was included in our pass.
Next on the list was a round of blacklight mini golf! When looking at our options, Kevin said that we could choose between an outdoor dinosaur themed course, or an indoor blacklight space themed course. No question in my mind, especially since it had been lightly raining all night!
The course was really cool! It started out as a space theme, but then changed into an Egyptian theme, then a rock and roll theme, then an underwater them. The course was really crowded, but remarkably we didn't do much waiting around for other players to finish.
I *heart* Beetles! This was in the rock and roll themed area of the course
Kevin ended up winning, despite my strong start. The last place we had left on our pass was the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. I really enjoy these museums, despite being kind of creepy! The one in San Antonio was the best I've visited, but they all tend to be quite good.
As promised, your daily dose of creepy
Kevin in a giant chair...no one else has a picture like this, I'm sure!
After a thorough tour through the museum, my head was still hurting from the simulator ride earlier, so I was ready to call it a day. But first we went back to the Great Canadian Midway to see about redeeming our tickets. I got a jelly spikey bracelet kind of thing, Kevin got a little soccer ball and I got a sheet of Hello Kitty stickers with what was left (which now, of course, I can't find. I guess they didn't make it home with me). When we were done, we walked back to the car, and headed back to the hotel. After a dose of Advil for my head, I hit the sack.