Canada's Wonderland
Two hundred acres of rollercoasters, and the default summer day out for every family in the northern GTA. A season pass costs about two visits.
Vaughan
New, big and thoroughly Italian. Vaughan built itself in a generation (Woodbridge, Maple, Thornhill, Kleinburg, Concord) and then got a subway extension, a downtown from scratch and the country's biggest theme park.
Stock photograph. Not Vaughan.
Brand new and roomy
Feels like
45 min on Line 1
To Union Station
Space per dollar, with a subway
Go for
How to say it
Vawn. One syllable: the GH does nothing at all. And Woodbridge is Woodbridge, never “west Vaughan”; the same goes for Maple, Thornhill and Kleinburg.
Heads up
The subway only helps if you live near it. For most of Vaughan the honest answer is a fifteen-minute drive to a car park that fills by half past seven, so check the actual distance to a station before you fall for a house.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
League1 Ontario
Vaughan Azzurri
One of the strongest semi-professional clubs in the province, playing at the provincial association's own home ground. Cheap, high standard, and a straight drive off the 400.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Vaughan.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
McMichael Canadian Art Collection
The Group of Seven, in a log-and-stone gallery in the woods at Kleinburg, with the painters themselves buried on the grounds. The best introduction to Canadian art there is.
Kortright Centre & Boyd
Proper forest twenty minutes from a six-lane road: maple syrup demonstrations in March, trails the rest of the year. Busy at weekends, empty on a Tuesday.
Woodbridge & Market Lane
Italian, and serious about it. The bakery with no sign and a queue at eight in the morning is the one you want.
Kleinburg village
Two streets of independents, galleries and a good café, ten minutes from the gallery and a world away from Highway 400.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
October
Woodbridge Fair
Running since 1847 over Thanksgiving weekend. Livestock, a midway and a genuinely competitive baking hall.
October
Halloween Haunt
Canada's Wonderland turns itself over to mazes and scare zones for the month. Not for young children, extremely popular with everyone else.
December
Winterfest
The theme park reopens in the cold with a skating trail down the middle of it and the whole place lit. Very good, very underrated.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.