Back to Wheels Inn

Wheels Inn is a hotel and indoor amusement park located in Chatham, Ontario, all little more than an hour outside of Detroit. It has a roller coaster, ferris wheel, and ten other rides the kids like to ride, plus mini golf, a children's climbing area, and a bowling alley. They have go-karts in the summer, and an indoor/outdoor pool with two long water slides for guests of the hotel.

My kids love going to Wheels Inn, and we spent yesterday with them, as I was still off from work.

This was not our first time visiting Wheels Inn on Chanukah, although it was the first time that just the five of us went to play there. The last time we went was before members of my family had begun making Aliyah.

It is much more fun to go with lots of family members than to go alone. We played Scattergories at night, and had lots of air hockey and rod hockey competitions.

But the most memorable thing happened when we lit Chanukah candles and tried to eat. There had been trips to Wheels Inn in the past where we brought subs. This time, wanted to Barbeque, but since that was not an option at the hotel, we decided to George Foreman dinner.

Before we ate, we all gathered in my parents room to light Chanukah candles. We knew we weren't supposed to light candles in the hotel room, but for some reason, we decided to do it anyway.

Wer also knew we weren't supposed to use a George Foreman grill in the room, but we decided to do that as well. My parents had an adjoining room for my sister, and so we set up the Foreman in my sister's room. There were more than 25 of us crammed into their room for the lighting of the Chanukah candles, which went flawlessly. In the next room over, George sizzled with hamburgers and hotdogs.

And then, the lights went out.

We had shorted the electricity, and, we thought, had knocked power out of the entire hotel, or at the very least, our floor.

The rooms were on the first floor, so we went outside, to see how many rooms lost power. From outside the hotel, all the rooms looked lit up, except for the two adjoining rooms, and one room next to those two, which I think was one of our family's rooms as well.

While some of us were outside looking at the hotel power situation, others went to the front desk, to see if there was a place we could set up the Foreman and prepare dinner. They found us an area, and we moved all the food, the grill, and all the accoutrements to the party room.

Meanwhile, we couldn't call the front desk to have them fix the power because we still had candles burning in one of the rooms, and the other room smelled like we had been cooking in there.

And so...we looked around the floor of the hotel, and found the circuit breakers. There was only one circuit breaker that was flipped off, and so we flipped it back on, and never needed to alert the desk that anything had happened.