Greetings, my loyal readers! After a week away I am back here at Wide World of Stuff; a few hours ago me and the people that live with me returned from an eight-day sojourn to our exotic, wonderful neighbor to the north, Canada! For the first time in my life I was in the wonderful city of Toronto, and it was a fabulous place to be (especially in late April, with no snow on the ground).
We ate, we drank, we laughed, we walked a lot, and fun using Canadian money with cool names like loonie and toonie.
Many, many thoughts accumulated during a week one of North America’s great cities…
— So first of all, I love Canada. Have been to Montreal several times, loved my one visit to Vancouver, and thoroughly enjoyed Toronto. Friendly people, lots to see and do, and a very cool, diverse vibe to the people. I do consider myself an honorary Canadian, because I’m wild about hockey, and I do love me some bacon.
The one Canadian love I strike out with is beer. I do not like beer. Canadians love it.
— So the Toronto Maple Leafs are the sporting passion in the city, and being there for the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, with the Leafs in it, was pretty awesome. First, I can’t tell you the number of people wearing blue and white Leafs stuff every day, whether they were playing or not. Hundreds of people, all devoted to this team that hasn’t won a Cup since LBJ was President. As a hockey fanatic, it was so cool to be in a city that passionate about the sport.
Unfortunately, the Leafs played three out of four stinkers when we were in town, including a god-awful performance against the Bruins Saturday night. Being so enveloped in Leaf-dom for a few days, I felt really bad for their fans.
— Speaking of hockey, a big reason I wanted to do this trip was to finally visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, the shrine of the sport. We went last Wednesday, spent about 6 hours there, and it was glorious. So many terrific reminders of hockey’s history, and so many things I learned about a sport I thought I knew so well (for example, I never knew that if the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team had lost the final game to Finland, that the USSR would’ve won the gold medal that year. What? Yeah, the format was a round robin and whoever had the best record would win. Crazy). Also? Tim Horton, of the famous Tim Horton’s donut chain in Canada? He was a pro hockey player in the 1950s and ’60s. Never knew that.
We got to do some awesome interactive games where we tried to score on NHL goalies, as well as try to stop pucks (needless to say, I did badly; I saved 2 of 8 shots, while scoring on one of eight.) And there was, of course, a room devoted to the Stanley Cup, and so for the second time ever, I got to be near it and hug it. I love my wife very much, but if she and Stan Cup were both drowning in the ocean, well, I’d have to think about who to save.
And oh yeah, I might’ve spent some money in the Hall of Fame gift shop.
— CN Tower, once the tallest building in North America, was pretty cool, although they had these glass window tiles on the floor where if you looked down, you saw ALL the way down. Like, hundreds of feet down. I was not a fan of that.
— As has become a depressing trend when I visit a city, it was darn near impossible to find an actual print newspaper in Toronto. For three days, every time I passed a store that should have had a paper, I came up empty. Finally, at a little newsstand a few steps from the Hockey Hall of Fame, I found a few. It was like finding water in the Sahara. Makes me so sad.
— We took a day trip to Niagara Falls, only about 90 minutes away, and it was breathtaking. Some things you just can’t appreciate on film, or in photos, and this was one of them.
The sheer power of the Falls, the beauty, especially as seen from close up on the boat tour we took, was awe-inspiring. The boat tour was awesome; we all got ponchos to put on before we boarded and they were very needed, because if you get close to the falls you get drenched. We had a picture-perfect sunny day there, we rode go-karts and played mini-golf, in a downtown that reminded me very much of Lake George.
— So there was only one thing I didn’t get to do in Toronto, and that was have the family take a curling lesson. A lovely woman at our hotel concierge desk named Anna tried her best when I asked her, early on in our stay, to see if she could find a club still open for curling in the final week of April. She called and called and even went to the suburbs of Toronto seeking a place we could go, but alas, all the rinks were done for the winter. Longtime readers may remember I took curling lessons about a decade ago and ended up accidentally bloodying this poor woman’s nose. So I wanted to try again! Next time, Toronto.
— It’s amazing watching how your kids change from trip to trip. Last vacation we took, Theo didn’t care so much about taking pictures; this time, he was like a little Ansel Adams, grabbing his Mom’s phone and trying to capture everything. OK, fine, a lot of his snaps were him taking selfies making weird faces. Still, it was a big change from the past.
— Finally, did I mention the bacon? Bacon, bacon, bacon. Mmmmm good. Bacon is like a food group in Canada, like, everything you order comes with it.
I love that country.
Wide World of Stuff 