Working from home has gone from an occasional, once-a-month perk to a daily norm for many office workers over the past six years. But with every perk there comes a cost, and for Toronto-area comedian and mental health advocate Ryan Zeitz, that was his productivity. His unexpected solution? “Working from home” from Canada’s Wonderland.
Since July of 2025, Zeitz has been using the city of Vaughan’s most famous tourist attraction, Canada’s Wonderland, as an unconventional coworking space. What started as an accident has since become a daily routine during the park’s regular season, at least five days a week.
“I try to be here every weekday,” Zeitz tells. “And then on Saturdays I play softball downtown, so the park’s right off the highway. I usually pop in once or twice before or after baseball.”
In other words, he’s found a way to turn Canada’s Wonderland into an all-inclusive office, cafeteria and recreational facility, and after a year of doing it, there are some surprisingly convincing benefits.
The idea itself was never a carefully calculated scheme to maximize the use of a season pass. Zeitz bought his first pass in almost a decade after spotting a late-July sale offering Gold Passes for $99, including parking. He and his partner figured that if they visited eight or 10 times, they would have used the pass to its full value. He decided that if he was going to do it, he was going to go full out, so he purchased the dining and drink plans as well.
“We were scanning the QR codes and getting all the free food and drinks,” said Zeitz. “It was just like I was in a cashless society where I was king.”
Within a few visits, his opinion on the pass already shifted.
Zeitz, who works remotely as a stand-up comedian and mental health speaker/educator, noticed that he wasn’t getting as much work done from his home as he had hoped. What appears to be many people’s dream actually isn’t always easy for Zeitz.
“There’s just so many distractions,” he says. “The couch is right there. It’s so easy to just lose an hour to Netflix.”
Coffee shops have worked for many; the past six years have been a testament to that, with countless viral videos showing us “Toronto’s best WFH cafes.” But they often come with another obvious problem: the cost.
“I was pretty productive working in cafes, but it also adds up for me,” he says.
Finally, everything culminated in this one lightbulb moment: “I was like, wait a second. I’ve technically already prepaid for a year and a half of free food and drinks. Why don’t I just come here?”
He initially worked from the lower level of Lazy Bear Lodge before searching online for quieter corners of the park. Eventually, he learned about Wonderland’s VIP lounge and upgraded to a Prestige Pass.
“Boom, I was a Prestige member, and I’ve been working out of the lounge ever since,” he says.
The unusual environment works particularly well for Zeitz’s skill set, some of which more and more people deal with daily.
“If there was an ADHD Olympics, I’m going to be on that podium,” he jokes. Zeitz was diagnosed only a few years ago and says one strategy he has since learned is body doubling — essentially doing a task in the presence of other people as a way of creating accountability and maintaining focus.
“Knowing that there are other people around and that I can be perceived by people helps me stay accountable and actually get work done,” he says.
At home, opening Netflix is easy. Doing it from a laptop in a busy amusement park lounge feels a little less like an option. Now that he also documents his Wonderland workdays online, there’s another layer to it.
Then there’s the financial perk that has gone unnoticed until Zeitz arrived on the scene to open our eyes to the glaringly obvious capabilities of this pass. Zeitz says his Prestige Pass, dining plan, premium drink plan, processing fee and tax came to $422.59 when he purchased them. Since then, prices have changed (even with those changes, the savings are undeniable), but with his package he receives parking, drinks and meals during visits.
At the rate at which Zeitz attends, he has taken the phrase “getting your money’s worth” to an entirely new level. Zeitz tracks the retail value of everything he redeems at the park in his TikTok videos, a means of gamifying his workday, which have gone viral. By the end of day 84, he had received just under $6,500 worth of food, beverages and other included benefits. At the time of our conversation, he had already made his way up to his 125th visit.
“By the end of the year, I’ll have visited 160 times since I got the pass,” he says, estimating that he could eventually hit around $12,000 in retail value.
He has even turned it into a personal challenge.
“I’m trying to rack up my retail value and hit $10,000,” he says. “Every drink that I have adds another $5.49 to my tally.”
Eating at an amusement park almost every day comes with its concerns — most would picture a diet of funnel cakes and chicken fingers. But Zeitz has managed to find enough variety and prioritize healthy choices enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s surviving exclusively on theme park food.
“There’s probably six or seven dishes that I kind of rotate around,” he says.
One of his current favourites is the garlic shrimp and vegetables at Manchu Wok.
“There’s so many vegetables,” he says. “There’s baby corn, there’s pepper, there’s onion, there’s celery, there’s carrots. It’s gorgeous.”
And apparently, they aren’t stingy with the shrimp.
“I’ve never had less than eight shrimp, and I’ve had as many as 16,” he says. “I’m averaging between 10 and 12.”
Other regular options include six-inch Subway sandwiches and meals from Lazy Bear Lodge, where he says sides can include cilantro lime corn and a rice pilaf with chickpeas and carrots.
But Zeitz also admits that eating the same handful of meals repeatedly doesn’t bother him much.
“I think with neurodivergence, I don’t mind eating the same thing every day,” he says. “And again, no cooking, no cleaning.”
Beyond himself, his Wonderland experiment has helped members of his online community. His favourite story from this experience hasn’t actually been about maximizing the value of his pass, but about the impact he’s had on someone else.
Not long after he began sharing his experience, a woman living on the Ontario Disability Support Program and a fixed income reached out. She lived close enough to Wonderland to get there with her mobility scooter and was curious whether the dining plan could work for her. Zeitz walked her through the process and some of the food options.
“She’s coming and getting her two square meals a day and just scooting over from her apartment,” he says. “Now she doesn’t have to worry as much about food costs.”
If someone visits frequently enough, he says, the cost can work out to less than a dollar per meal over the life of the plan.
“That was by far my favourite thing that’s happened throughout all this,” he says.
And despite joking that he may have discovered a secret “Daddy Wonderland doesn’t want you to know,” the park itself is very much aware of what he’s doing and supporting him along the way.
More than a year after his accidental experiment began, he still hasn’t gotten sick of his unusual office, and who could blame him? If all of our mid-work coffee breaks included a quick trip on Leviathan, going to work would be one of the better parts of most of our weeks.
