Niagara Falls, Ontario is like a living LSD nightmare.
I've never done acid, of course, but I've seen the pictures. The garish, surreal visual overstimulation is probably the closest I would ever want to get - or likely will get - to that particular state of transcendence. Not that the place is without its charms.
Where else on the planet would you find a Tim Horton's, a ferris wheel, a fudge shop and a wax museum all on the same block?
As you walk through the city's tourist core, you quickly realize that the entire place is designed to separate you from your money. If the formal attractions - the Maid of the Mist, the butterfly and animal museums, and certainly the casinos - don't do it, then the gift shops and overpriced restaurants will.
The epitome of this artificial existence is surely Great Wolf Lodge, complete with $350-a-night fake plastic long bunks and animatronic wolves in the lobby. It also reflects the incursion of major US retail into the Canadian market in ways thought impossible a generation ago. Where Great Wolf goes, so go Walmart and the Gap, eventually.
Great Wolf - whatever its family entertainment value - is also part of the Disneyfication of our collective culture. No experience is too precious to be commodified, repackaged and sold back to us at grotesquely inflated prices.
My family has enjoyed many hours of wholesome fun in the Falls and at Great Wolf. And why shouldn't we? We fit the consumer demographic perfectly.
Or would, if we could figure out how to add .2 of a child.
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