Trip Report: Paramount Canada's Wonderland
Vaughan, Ontario - 09/05/2004

"Maybe I should have gone to the CNE!"

Sunday morning I got up, grabbed the cooler and the camera, and packed the gear into the car. I noticed something strange about the front wheel, and so I made a closer inspection. A roofing nail was buried in the outer edge of the surface tread of the passenger side front tire of my car. "Great," I thought. "How am I going to get that fixed today?"

I inquired at the hotel desk about a repair shop. This was a simple puncture, the vehicle could still be driven, and any halfway competent mechanic could plug the tire in about 90 seconds...uh...flat. Heck, I could do it if I had the right equipment. Which I don't. The desk clerk called the shuttle driver who suggested a shop not far from the hotel. He proceeded to tell me how to get there. "You go that way out of here, go down past the two banks and turn right, you'll see a yellow sign, it's on the left, you can't miss it."

Right. Why is it that people who give directions can't give useful information, like, oh, say, perhaps an ADDRESS or STREET NAME? Obviously an address would be best, but a street and nearby cross-street would be a lot better than a bunch of landmarks that are just like the landmarks visible on every other street...

Anyway, the point is that I never did find the garage the shuttle driver recommended. Or perhaps I did, but it was one of the many garages I found that was closed for the holiday weekend. Finally, as I had nearly given up, wondering why there don't seem to be any major general-merchandise stores in Toronto (lots of bulk grocery stores, but no general merchandise, *-Mart type stores), I found exactly what I needed: a Canadian Tire franchise. I pulled in and learned that it would be about 40 minutes before they could get my car in to work on it. Their procedure is to dismount the tire and put a flat patch on the inside, which is fine. I checked the car in, then went upstairs to kill time by checking out the Canadian Tire retail store. It isn't really a tire store, or even an automotive store, but it is, oddly enough, a quasi-general-merchandise store. It isn't exactly a *-Mart, but it has most of the kinds of merchandise that *men* are after (tools, electronics, automotive stuff, camping gear, hardware...). Kind of like a "Tractor Supply Company" store without the farm implements. I wandered around and found exactly what I needed: a tire plugging kit. I bought it, went back outside, and patched my tire in 90 seconds flat. Then I hooked up my car-powered air compressor, collected my key from the service counter, and within minutes, I was back on the road again.

By this time, it was time for lunch, so I had some lunch before going to the park. Then I headed on up Jane St. into Vaughan, and approached Canada's Wonderland. I encountered a very long line of cars trying to get into the place, and I immediately noticed that Wonderland was apparently doing everything they possibly could to make it difficult for people to get into the lot. First of all, they had half as many parking toll booths as they needed, meaning that they used that brain-dead toll plaza configuration where they have two lanes of traffic at each booth, meaning that at least half of the toll collectors are on the right-hand side of the approaching vehicles. I remind you again: in North America, including Canada, almost all vehicles...including my Canadian-built car...are configured with the driver on the left-hand side. It should go without saying, then, that it only makes sense to collect tolls only from the left-hand side [Footnote 1]. Canada's Wonderland takes that bit of insanity one step further by charging $6.52 for parking, which, once you add in the various Federal and Provincial taxes yields a parking fee of...$7.50! That's right...in addition to being a commentary on the obscene level of taxation in Ontario, not to mention Paramount Parks' lowest parking fee in the chain (that works out to about US$5.14 before tax, or US$5.85 after tax...I think Kings Island is up to US$9.00 now...), Wonderland has a parking fee that practically guarantees that every vehicle coming through the gate will need change. Thanks to Canada's dollar- and two-dollar coins, fees of $5, $6, $7, and $8 would all be easy, much like the $5 and $10 fees here. But $7.50????

The parking lot was darned near full, and I parked out in the Clark Griswold section. As I walked toward the park gate, I noticed that a section of the lot near the gate has been marked off as "Season Pass Parking" but that the entrance to that section was blocked off with a sawhorse and a sign indicating that the section is full. Four or five empty spaces were visible from the section entrance, and I heard a park security guard complaining that the booth attendant had been verbally assaulted several times because he wasn't letting anyone into the lot section. It was looking like it might be an...umm...interesting day at Wonderland.

Since my last visit, Wonderland has pulled the same stunt as Kings Island, erecting a fence around the park entrance plaza and installing two banks of magnetometers. Unlike Kings Island, Wonderland actually had most of the stations manned. I still think the things are a waste of space, money, time, and effort; after all, the only serious incident I have ever heard of that happened at Wonderland actually happened in the parking lot, where the magnetometers would have made no difference at all. As it was, the magnetometers were causing a huge backlog of people trying to get into the park. Trouble is, people...especially people with young children...by necessity carry a lot of crap with them into the park, Much of that assorted crap is metal, and it makes the magnetometers an offensively inefficient means of screening customers for...ah...whatever it is that they are looking for. It also encourages people like me to enter the park with no change in our pockets, but that's an issue for later...! Suffice to say that they could improve operations at the front of the park immensely by running a bulldozer through the new fence and plaza entry.

Once through Checkpoint Dudley, getting through the gate and into the park was comparatively simple. That's a lot of text up there, but you have to understand...from the time I left the Pizza Pizza restaurant across the street from the park (their barbecue chicken sandwich is pretty good!) until I got into the park...that is, down the entrance driveway, through the toll-booths, into a parking space, through the checkpoint, and into the park...took almost an hour!

Every other time that I have visited Canada's Wonderland, I've started by going up the right-hand side of the fountain and into the part of the park that has a kind of medieval theme to it. This time I opted to go the other way first. It was late enough in the day that it probably didn't matter crowd-wise, so I headed off into the "Grande World Exposition of 1890" section of the park. I went through the gate, past a couple of pillars, and past a large globe. Across from me was something that looks like a Spanish mission, behind it a grouping of tents, down an adjoining midway a large games building with a glass center dome and a bunch of green domes. It took me a minute, but then I realized that the fact that the style of the buildings bore no resemblance to the contents of the buildings didn't matter. That the buildings didn't appear to go together was exactly the point: This is supposed to look like a mini World's Fair. The games are in the Crystal Palace-type building (the version at Disney's Magic Kingdom is a much better likeness...), the mission has a Skycoaster concession, tee shirts are sold from the tents behind, and it all makes sense. It's the diversity of the architecture that makes it all fit. Pity this doesn't go on for long. On around the corner is Top Gun, the park's Suspended Looping Coaster, and the hour-long queue that goes with it. Eeeyagh! Maybe I should have gone around the other way!

I skipped it, knowing that it is one of the better SLCs, but still just an SLC. Next to it was a very interesting looking contraption, a blue and yellow roller coaster with a most unusual lift mechanism. It's called "Tomb Raider: The Ride", which is odd, as I know that "Tomb Raider: The Ride" is a Giant Top-Spin in a Box. So, I reasoned, this must really be "Tomb Raider: The Other Ride." Anyway, it looks to have a Wild Mouse-like footprint, with a space-saving spiral lift. It also has a line of people extending through the entire queue, out the gate, and down the midway towards Top Gun. I haven't heard anything good about this coaster, but I have to ride it. That doesn't mean I have to ride it right *now*. Hopefully, later in the day it won't be such a long wait.

Continuing around the Southern perimeter of the park, I came to the plaza occupied by Psyclone, the Mondial pendulum ride that proved to Paramount that buying the larger Huss version for Kings Island would be a good idea. It too had a full queue. Is there a single ride in this park that doesn't have an hours' wait today? I got my answer quickly. Right next to Psyclone is last year's new ride, the Sledge Hammer, a Huss Giant Jump. The ride has six sweeps, and at the end of each sweep is a pod with four pairs of seats. The seats are the same as the seat pairs on Tomb Raider or Delerium, except that much to my surprise, Paramount did not equip these with (unnecessary with this design) safety belts. I thought that was a Paramount company policy on any ride with dangling feet especially after........[Footnote 2]. Anyway, the pods are pretty tight...the seats face each other, they are suspended from above, and there is only a narrow space between the seat groups. Once everybody is secured, the pods rotate, the ride center rotates, and the sweeps shift from a "hanging nearly straight down" position to a "reaching nearly straight up" position. The pods hang down at any sweep position, so there is barely any swinging, and no inversion. The seat is quite high at this point, but the height is barely a factor in the ride, as the shoulder bar means you can't lean forward far enough to look down past the bottom of the seat across from you, if you look to either side all you see is the shoulder bar, and out diagonally you can barely see between the seats. So the visual experience is practically non-existent. As for forces, there are almost none. You would expect that the sweeps would rise to the full upward position and then suddenly drop, in order to give a bit of a dropping sensation, but it doesn't work that way. Instead, the arms go up and stay up for a while, then drop quickly, but not quickly enough. Even when the dropping action stops, it is so smooth that it doesn't give much of a sensation. I can see why this ride didn't have a long line. It's impressive enough to deserve one ride, but once on board there just isn't anything there to make it worth riding again. It's big and impressive, but it just doesn't do anything. Looking around the plaza, I realized that the park's Monster used to be in this area, and to be perfectly honest, the Monster was a much better ride than this thing. Perhaps the Sledge Hammer can be fixed with a programming change; as it is right now, it is a very poor substitute for the Monster, and unlike the Psyclone, I hope Kings Island doesn't get one.

Next to the Sledge Hammer is the entrance to the Kingswood Music Centre, the park's performance shed. A sign over the entrance indicated that today was the "Italian Festival," which at least partially explains the droves of people in the park. Later in the day I would see just how well this explains the size of the crowd. I have no idea what was going on in there; I went on down the midway and past the Orbiter, a Huss Skylab. The interesting thing about the ride is that when it is down, it is entirely hidden behind a hillside. So entirely hidden, in fact, that it doesn't show up on the official park map!

Skyrider is the park's Togo stand-up coaster, itself a copy of the departed King Cobra from Kings Island. I remember that it runs pretty well. I walked up the exit ramp to examine the train. Yup, the go/no-go safety belts added to the shoulder bars are still there. Experience tells me that means I can't ride, so I didn't bother standing in line. Instead, I opted to ride the Mighty Canadian Minebuster.

I didn't quite know what to expect. Minebuster had both trains running, but the wait was still about 45 minutes. The first time I rode this coaster, I was surprised that it was a fantastic ride. With a little research, I determined that it was designed in 1941 by Herb Schmeck as the Shooting Star at Coney Island. Of course, the Shooting Star didn't survive when Coney was demolished in 1971, so this masterpiece of a coaster was built, surprisingly enough, by Mr. CopyCoaster himself, Curt Summers. The first time I rode it, it was fantastic. Last time I rode it, Paramount had emasculated both the outbound run and the return run, replacing a couple of small hills with one big wide hill. This year...given what has happened at Kings Island, I was a little worried.

The train pulled in, and I noted that it is still made up of 3-bench non-articulated PTC cars. Each seat is equipped with an individual retracting seat belt just as on the trains at Kings Island. The seats have high seat backs, and all of the seating surfaces are generously padded. The ratcheting lap bars are the all-mechanical version, with the dirty-but-mostly-transparent plastic covers that seem to be unique to Canada's Wonderland. You know, if Paramount were to clone this train and put seven copies of it on the older large wood coasters at Kings Island, I would be a lot happier with that park. I sat down and pulled the lap bar down. The first two notches seem to be missing, just as at Kings Island. I noted on the empty seat that the bar can only go down as far as the seat divider, not all the way to the seat cushion as at Kings Island. Yes, if a train has to have these "features", this is the way to go about it. The brake released, and we rolled through the left-hand U-turn to the lift. The ride starts with a lift, first drop, medium hill, a high right-hand turn, then a drop into two short airtimeone tall, broad, boring hills. One would assume that they did this in order to reduce the wear caused by the train bouncing on the airtime hills. It stands to reason, then, that the new track ought to be nice and smooth, right?

Wrong. The train bounces like crazy over this bit of track, and the structure wobbles sideways. There has been some speculation about how they might do the 'driving down stairs' effect in the Italian Job coaster next year; this hill on the Not-So-Mighty Canadian Ball-Buster rides like it might be the prototype. This is utterly shameful. The reprofiled ride is rougher than the original ride ever was, and Paramount should be ashamed at operating a ride in this condition. Once past the reprofiled section, the ride is OK through the turnaround, then starts hammering again on another poorly built bridge hill before hammering through the helix and back into the station. It should have been a great ride, but it turned out to be terrible. Wonderland should be ashamed. Paramount should be ashamed. What has happened to Paramount's wood coaster maintenance? They used to be good at this stuff!

Well, Minebuster hurt, both physically and emotionally. I hoped the rest of the park would be better, and I proceeded on around the bend. This led me past the Skyrider and down the path behind the waterpark. Canada's Wonderland is technically a general-admission park with ride tickets and POP hand-stamps, although I never caught anyone checking for handstamps or collecting tickets. But there is a gate between the dry park and the water park indicating the admission charge of either a POP handstamp or a couple of tickets.

Across the back of the park, Wonderland has a series of Kiddieland areas. First up was the Hanna-Barbera section, with a couple of classic kiddie rides including the unique Bradley & Kaye swan boat conveyor ride. More important from a coaster rider's perspective is Scooby Doo's Ghoster Coaster. Ghoster Coaster is a junior wood coaster that bears a striking resemblance to Kings Island's Beastie, or Wyandot Lake's Sea Dragon. Resemblance is all it bears to the Beastie, however, and that requires a little imagination as Ghoster Coaster, unlike the Beastie, is not painted purple. In fact it isn't painted at all. I think it might also be a little shorter, end to end. The train still has the old sleved-bolt couplers, but I noticed that Wonderland has added a little wart to the end of the lap bar with a bolt through it which prevents the lap bar from dropping past the horizontal position...it effectively and elegantly solves the problem that Wyandot Lake has with the lap bar dropping past the latch point. As for the ride, it's a familiar experience, but it doesn't have Beastie's tunnel, nor does it have Beastie's annoying trim brake. I say the ride might be slightly shorter than Beastie or Sea Dragon because it also doesn't have the Sea Dragon's final dip, but unlike Beastie, it doesn't appear that anything is missing on the return run. In all, it's a competent junior coaster that...shame on you, Paramount...runs a whole lot better than Minebuster.

The entire back end of Canada's Wonderland is an interconnected series of three Kiddielands. Past The area with the Ghoster Coaster is another section which features a Vekoma junior inverted coaster, the Silver Streak [Footnote 3]. It's identical (except for the name and color) to the Rugrats Runaway Reptar Roller Coaster at Kings Island. Well, mostly identical, anyway. There are a few other mostly cosmetic differences that distinguish this one from the earlier model.

The third kiddie area was a very clever re-creation of a Bedrock (as in, home-town of "The Flintstones") amusement park. Note the past-tense. That has all been stripped out, and replaced with "Nick Central". The area now includes several kiddie-type rides, all of which (except for the bumper cars) also accommodate parents. The first one I saw is unlike anything I have ever seen before. It's a rotating ride much like a Mini-Jet. The tubs are little automobiles, and there is a pair of handles in the center much like the drive arm on a railroad hand-car. Apparently [Footnote 4] the riders pump the handles repeatedly to cause the cars to rise, then at the end of the cycle the ones who made it all the way to the top get to stay there a while while the others have to ride around at platform level. So the ride is both interactive and competitive. Next to that ride is a tower ride that doesn't appear to have any interaction required, and across the midway is an odd thing that looks like a miniature Polyp with enclosed teacup-ride cars on it. That one seemed to be particularly popular.

I found the exit path and walked past the swan boat ride and under the rainbow arch, leaving North America's Largest Kiddieland behind. That took me down the sort of least-resistance path behind Wonder Mountain and past the 90-minute wait for the Vortex and the 90-minute wait for The Fly. Ewwwww. Maybe I should have gone to the CNE! This brought me back into the Grande Exposition section where the lines had failed to get any shorter. Realizing this, I resigned myself to a long wait for Tomb Raider: The Other Ride.

The entrance consists of a large sign flanked by large torches with impressive genuine flames coming off the top. Next to the entrance is a tent containing some of Ms. Croft's equipment, including a crate containing a motorcycle. The tire track for the motorcycle actually matches up with the bike, which means they were a little more careful (or a little more lucky) with the detail here than with the Land Rover at Kings Island. That is the extent of the Tomb Raider decoration on the ride. The ride itself is blue and yellow and almost but not quite entirely unlike anything else I have ever seen. The ride looks to be about the same size as a Zyklon, perhaps a little narrower from front to back. The layout is kind of like a Wild Mouse, only turned on its side...perhaps Kings Dominion's Volcano is a better comparison. The queue goes right past the ride's unique lift mechanism, and gave me some good views of the ride system. The station takes up the entire back side of the ride, parallel to the midway. It looks like the ride was designed to not stop for loading and unloading, although Wonderland was stopping the cars at the downtrack end of the station for a final check. They do the same thing with The Fly, and my guess is that it is related to Paramount Parks' somewhat paranoid interpretation of block system design: Paramount seems to frown on allowing trains into adjacent blocks. The car comes into the station and unloads, then rolls through the station with riders boarding the moving car. Riders are secured, and the ride begins.

Tomb Raider's car is four positions wide, and in the station it sits in a vertical position. To board, you simply walk up the ladder rungs at the bottom of the car, and lean forward into the car base. It's very much like the loading process on the Huss Fly Away, if you've ever seen that thing, and it really is quite simple. That allows for ...umm... a plurality of standing positions, allowing riders of different heights to easily pick an appropriate position. The interesting thing about this is that it should have simplified the design computations for the ride a bit. Consider the riding position for a moment. On most coasters, you can predict with some accuracy the rider's center of mass: it's located between the seat cushion and the lap bar. The location of any other critical point is at best an educated guess. By comparison, on Tomb Raider, it is the rider's head that is in a predictable location, at least to a resolution of about four inches. That might be critical, as the entire body is supported by the 'seat' frame, EXCEPT for the head, which sticks out between a pair of shoulder bars. As the riders stand on the car frame, a gate is pulled down behind them. It doesn't seem to be adjustable, so it is similar to the gate on a Kite Flyer tub, but there is a separate one for each car. Just before the car leaves the station, it rolls up a large ramp which pushes the car frame into the face-down horizontal position. Given that Zamperla used such obviously mechanical means to raise the car and lock it into place, I was a little surprised to see a pair of sealed lead batteries and a rather large electronics package under each car. I'm not entirely sure what that's all about...I guess that with multiple locking pins, four rider restraints, and the car position to worry about, they preferred to put some intelligence on the vehicle and just have it report OK/!OK back to the control system instead of making the controls do all those checks. It's just a guess on my part, of course. It's worth noting that by starting in a forward-leaning standing position and then rotating into a horizontal position, Zamperla's flying coaster is the first face-down coaster I've seen where the rider is actually stretched out in a real flying position, not just in a seat pointed down.

From the station, the cars are advanced out to the lift hill, which is a tight spiral with a tall paddle in the middle. This paddle rotates continuously and literally pushes against an arm on the side of the car. The arm has a wheel on the end so that it can roll freely up the edge of the paddle as the car gets pushed around and thus up the spiral. The neat thing about it is that the pitch of the spiral actually changes, and the lift has no problem with that. It's so clever and so simple that I am surprised that I've never seen another ride with this configuration. It really saves a lot of space on the ride footprint.

Unfortunately, as clever as the ride is from the station to the top of the lift, once it goes over the top, things deteriorate a bit. The ride runs a bit rough, to start with, and at several points during the ride, it whips around tight curves so that the rider gets his shoulder, neck, and head beaten up. This is surprising when you consider that the head is in a predictable position, and you would expect that the design would take that into account and minimize the lateral forces applied to the head. I'm not sure what the problem is, but it isn't an entirely pleasant ride. The part that surprised me was the barrel rolls. They are taken slowly, and I guess I was expecting to get dumped out of the 'seat' into the cage and then back into the 'seat' again. Instead, I stayed firmly planted in the 'seat' through the maneuver, and it wasn't a bad thing at all. What was bad was the head-thwacking, some of which was particularly nasty. The shoulder bar is thick enough to cause trouble, and some of the hits against the bar were pretty hard. When I got off, my initial reaction was one of, "What the @#$! happened?!" The car came back into the station and dropped to the load position and I stepped out,

I wanted to like it. There are a lot of neat things about the ride, but something in the execution just doesn't work right. I think I need to ride it again, but when I got off I had a headache, and I really didn't want to burn another hour to get beaten up again. On the whole, I think the ride is not as bad as I was led to believe, but it wasn't exactly great, either. I think it's salvageable, but I don't quite know what it would take. What it needs is simple: "Make it not hurt!" Figuring out exactly how to do that, though...that's the complicated bit.

I crossed the park centerline again and took a ride on Thunder Run, the Mack Blauer Enzian powered !coaster that snakes through the mountain. I don't quite 'get' it, but the ride is fun anyway. When I got off, I continued around to the Wild Beast, and noticed that I had finally found the place in the park where the crowds weren't. Wild Beast had only about a ten minute wait, and I took advantage. It was actually running reasonably well, especially compared with Minebusted. Wild Beast lacks the all-out intensity that Minebuster used to have, but it also lacks the wobbling, rattling, and pounding that Minebusted has now. And it has a couple of extreme airtime moments of its own. It is at least the equal of Ghoster Coaster among the coasters in this park. And for once, I don't mean that as an insult! Seriously, the Wild Beast is a decent coaster, and the long line...even late in the day when the crowd had mostly migrated to the other side of the park...is a testimony to that.

Almost next door to the Wild Beast is Dragon Fyre, not to be confused with the coaster that used to operate at Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It's an ancient Arrow looping coaster, two vertical loops, a full Corkscrew, and a helix. It's also one of the smoothest running Arrow coasters anywhere, without so much as a hint of headbanging anywhere on the ride. So I think I am figuring out the pattern...the North end of the park has good coasters that run great, and the South end of the park has not so great coasters that don't run so great. Then there is the stuff in the middle...

In the middle of the park is Wonder Mountain. It features Thunder Run, the !coaster that people wonder about, and of course, Vortex. Vortex is an Arrow suspended coaster built on the back side of the mountain, and it's a bit of a departure in suspended coaster designs. It's a short ride, but it features a couple of long, steep drops that make for a pretty spectacular ride. This is another ride that started at Canada's Wonderland and got duplicated at Kings Island, and living an hour and a half from Kings Island I am very happy for it. Apart from the setting, Vortex is practically the same as Kings Island's Top Gun. Mechanically, the two rides are almost identical, with the same layout. Vortex has the same style wheel carriers as Top Gun, but with the smaller road wheels. Top Gun goes flying past Son of Beast while Vortex swings over a pond. Either way, the ride is a lot of fun and apart from being brutally short, it may well be one of the best suspended coasters built. I knew that before I spent half an hour waiting in line. So naturally I was pretty happy to learn that unlike...ahem...another coaster in the park, Vortex is as good as ever.

It was late, but as I was tempted by an ice cream cookie sandwich that someone was eating in line, so I sought one out. Yes, I found one, but the stand was having some difficulty as the cash register was very nearly out of change (including $1 and $2 coins). Well, of course! Those of us who were trying to avoid delays going through Checkpoint Dudley didn't bring any change into the park with us, and by now we're exhausting the park's supply! Somehow the stand operator managed to scrape together the $2.20 in change, and I got my chocolate chip cookie sandwich. Yum! Now what...

I decided I would go take a ride on Top Gun, the suspended looping coaster. I guess that makes me a glutton for punishment, or something. It turned out to be my biggest mistake of the day. Remember that Italian Day event that was going on in the ampitheater? I have no idea what it was, but whatever it was, it ended just as I approached Top Gun. That side of the park was suddenly MOBBED to the extent that it was darned near impossible to move down the midway. With much effort I made my way to the Top Gun entrance, along with the 30,000 other people who had just come out of the festivities and decided they wanted to ride it as well.

Ick. I decided it had been a bad idea. Instead, I cut back through the center of the park, and decided to end my day with a quick peek into a few of the gift shops, none of which seemed to contain any "Canada's Wonderland" merchandise. I guess local parks don't carry park merchandise these days; the stuff apparently doesn't sell or something.

Well, it hadn't been a bad day at Canada's Wonderland. The place was ridiculously crowded, so I didn't get to ride as much as I would have liked. The weather had been just about perfect, and of the Paramount parks I have visited, Wonderland seems to be the nicest in many ways. Unfortunately, it also wasn't an especially good day at Wonderland, largely because it had been so crowded. It was worse than the "Bring a Friend for Free" day at Kings Island earlier this year. I still like Wonderland, but in the future, I think I'll rule out the Sunday of Labour Day as a good day to go.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: Of course, if parks would do as I have been advocating for years, and just roll the parking fee into the admission price, they could eliminate the toll booths entirely... [Return to text]

Footnote 2: Paramount's Great America, 8/22/1999. I'll leave it at that. [Return to text]

Footnote 3: "Silver Streak" wasn't a Paramount movie... [Return to text]

Footnote 4: I only watched it; I didn't ride. [Return to text]

--DCAjr.

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