Due to a perfectly timed combo of pandemic and pregnancy, the wife and I hadn’t been on a vacation for nearly five years. But our kid is now three years old, which seemed like a good enough age to finally go somewhere, so that’s what we did last week.
People will tell you that travelling with young children isn’t fun; that going through the airport is a nightmare, keeping them entertained throughout the trip is exhausting, you can’t do anything fun in the evening because they go to bed so early, and that the whole thing just doesn’t have much of a ‘vacation vibe’ when you spend so much time and energy having to be a parent.
Well, now that I’ve done it myself, let me tell you this: those people are 100 per cent correct. Vacationing with kids sucks. It’s barely vacationing. It’s basically the same as being at home, except you have to clean beach sand out of your kid’s butt-crack every night.
Spending a week in the Dominican and finding very little for my kid to do made me realize there is a vast, seemingly untapped market for more family-oriented vacation retreats.
Niagara fancies itself the vacation destination capital of Canada, but look at how we always market ourselves: casinos, wineries, golf. It’s the holy trinity of non-family-friendly activities.
I’m now at that age where my friends and siblings all have young kids. When I go back home and visit them, they’re always like, Hey, we should bring the kids and come down to visit you guys in Niagara— we’ve heard about that Great Wolf Lodge place. At that point I usually warn them to look at the prices for that place first, because as amazing as Great Wolf is for a family retreat, the cost of staying there has gone absolutely bananas.
Well, what about Marineland, they’ll usually ask after that, which, sure, I guess Marineland is sorta still a thing, but since John Holer died back in 2018, followed by his wife Marie last year, that place has all but withered away, and is now rumoured to be on the seller’s block to an investor with plans for… yet another casino.
It boggles my mind that no developer has really leaned into building some kind of budget-friendly, family-oriented vacation tourism thing down here. Seems like a home run to me, especially given there are very few similar things to compete against.
Because you gotta remember, all those pandemic babies that were conceived during the lockdowns back in 2020 and 2021 are now three and four years old, and their exhausted parents are very much looking for something to do, but now that Trump’s tariff threats have destroyed the Canadian dollar, vacationing abroad is fast becoming prohibitively expensive. Families are going to start looking at domestic travel as an alternative, and if we want them to consider Niagara as a destination option, we need to have something to keep the kiddos happy.
And sure, there’s always the [alert: shameless marketing plug incoming] annual Wiener Dog Races at beautiful Fort Erie Race Track, a full day of completely free fun for the whole family, but that’s just one day [July 13 to be specific, mark your calendars!] and we need things that go beyond just one day of amazing, wacky, hilarious dog racing antics.
If all Niagara wants to be is a ‘Vegas North,’ and we just want to stick to casinos and golf and wineries, I guess that’s one road to go down. But if we’re going to do that, we might as well own it and go all the way in. Similar to the way Nebraska embraced being a terrible vacation destination.
After four straight years of being ranked 50th of 50 on the list of states which tourists were interested in visiting, the Nebraska Tourism Commission adopted as its official new tourism slogan, “Nebraska: honestly, it’s not for everyone.”
We should do the same thing and make our slogan, “Niagara: honestly, just leave the kids with their grandparents because there’s nothing here for them.”
James Culic wants to go back to Japan but doesn’t want to bring his kid so he’s in the market for a babysitter for a few weeks. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or send a letter to the editor—copied to Child Protective Services—telling us why he’s a terrible dad for wanting to vacation without his kid.
