Way back in the Mesozoic Era, when our Rotten Kids were just young little punks — punklets, if you will — we used to take these adventurous vacations to exotic places. Well, more “staycations” if you like, on account I’m talking about adventures all the way up to Edmonton and all the way down to Calgary. For, like, two whole days. None of this, two or three weeks in Hawaii stuff for a freelancer and his family – but you know what — both rotten kids and the better half and yours truly all agree that those were the best mini-holidays Ever.
I’m talking specifically about what was then the Fantasyland Hotel at West Edmonton Mall, and the Sheraton Hotel near the Calgary Airport. The Mall hotel has those wonderfully weird “theme rooms” all decorated like a jungle safari (complete with a waterfall) or a train station (complete with crossing lights) or — get this —you could sleep in back of a big plastic truck bed! The RKs would have to fight me for that one. And the Mall was, and still is, a famous fantasyland in itself. Great fun, except you could get separated from your family and be lost in there for hours. (So they tell me.)
And the Sheraton in Cowtown? Two words: Water Slides. Long before water slides showed up in every hotel, motel, and public pool the Sheraton Hotel had very rare and very huge indoor water slides that were certified kid-magnets. For the fairly reasonable price of a room you could slide in the water to your heart’s content, and then try to sleep in a hotel full of wet and wired kids running up and down the hallways all night long.
But those waterslides were the cat’s meow, if cats happened to like water. You opened a door in the second floor hallway of the hotel to find a wonderful world of water waiting for you to plunge into. For a day or two you could pretend that it wasn’t minus 20 outside, and that winters weren’t eight months long.
We would have contests for who could slide the fastest, and — in my case — who would have to be rescued from the bottom of the pool after careening out the end of the waterslide and having 45 gallons of chlorinated water shoot up his nose.
When the daughter Rotten Kid was really little, I used to go down the slide with her, to (theoretically) keep her safe. This, of course, never worked. We always got going way too fast — the RK screaming with joy, me screaming in terror — and when we hit the pool I’d attempt to hold her up in the air to keep her head above water. This meant that I invariably had to be rescued from the bottom of the pool. She was fine. “Let’s do it again, Dad!” she would say as the Better Half dialed 911. But we would do it again. And again. Smiles as big as the splashes.
I was thinking about all that when I pulled up to the Sheraton a few weeks ago. I was in town for a couple of days, and it had been years since I’d stayed at the legendary waterslide hotel. ‘I wonder if everything has changed’, I thought to myself as I trudged through the blizzard and the dumb deep snow, remembering those good old days. I could almost smell the chlorine.
Next week’s column: Will an old fossil be dumb enough to try a waterslide again? (Of course he will…)
Harley Hay is a Red Deer writer and filmmaker.