“Do you want to go to Toronto? They’re turning Wonderland into a haunted house where people jump out at you!”
No, that sounds really far away and I hate people jumping out in a scary way. No.
“But it’s going to be a road trip!”
Sold.
So the second day after flying home from Whitehorse, a two-day ordeal of cross-Canada flight delays and airport food, I found myself looking forward to sitting shotgun for endless hours in a one-day adventure from O-Town to Peterborough, where we picked up our BFF and then onwards to Ajax to pick up another and finally to Wonderland.
“Ew, did someone fart or is that smell just this awful town?”
“Did you know the Cat Came Back song is actually about the cat hacking people to pieces?” Oddly enough, the driver had the song on her iPod, so we listened as we drove through the orange and red tree-lined highway number seven. Stranger still was she was right. Listen to it, it’s quite perturbing.
“So I don’t want to lose weight, I just want to tighten,” [insert hand gestures from Knocked Up]
And thus is a sampling of the conversation that carried us from Ottawa to Peterborough. We actually hardly paid attention to the background music and if we did it was only to sing along off-key and with the passion every girl shares after pronouncing “Oh, I LOVE this SONG!”
Peterborough is a beautiful town and after living in Whitehorse, it seems much bigger and busier than I had previously given it credit for. We ate at K and A’s favourite, before finding our new spots in the car and driving onward ho to Ajax. We picked up another, bought our tickets and were an hour away from the land of wonder.
Under the stars we rode roller coasters, bought $23 pizza and screamed until we were hoarse. My lower back was sore from the clenched muscles K and I sustained while going through haunted houses, arms around each other, hunched over, nervously laughing and nervously twitching backwards when things indeed did jump out at us.
It actually wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. Then again, I hadn’t opted to go in the clown-themed haunted house where midway through, the lights turned up and a voice announced there was a fire and everyone was to evacuate. Unfortunately, the haunted house was structured as a maze and poor claustrophobic A and S found themselves in survival mode trying to get out of the smoke-filled, creepy clown-filled tent.
We decided to drive back that night, promising that whoever sat up front had to stay awake with the driver.
At exactly midnight I opened my birthday present from A and our car celebrated the beginning of my birthday. It was beautiful to start this year off with these girls around me! And I got A to sing us the song she is to perform as I walk down the aisle in less than a month, and she totally made me cry.
We got home about 5 in the a.m. I sleepily said goodbye, I thanked them for b-day wishes and shuffled up to my mum’s front door to sleep another few hors before it was birthday mode and, where I find myself now, in an extreme wedding-planning zone.