Travel Diary:
End of Day 1: we walked through downtown Toronto and had dinner at
Canoe Restaurant, which had an amazing lake view. We had the "Summerlicious" tasting menu, so you got a choice from three options on three courses. I opted for the salmon tartare (very good) the Alberta beef two ways (I liked the roast beef, but not the stewed short rib so much) and a lime tart (NOT KEY LIME! *Canadian noises about how their lime tart is totally not the same as a Key Lime Pie tart*) It was nice, beautiful view of Lake Ontario, and I haven't had a meal that felt that fancy in a while. The prices were kinda steep, but it's Canadian dollars so NBD. You adjust that shit down 25% mentally to get to the real cost. Unfortunately this level of fancy restaurant doesn't have a kids menu so we got Tilly an order of French fries and bites off our plates as she'd take them. She won't eat salmon tartare but she did eat the other things.
Impressions of Toronto: going in, the only thing I knew about Toronto was the
Legend of Rob Ford. Having been there for 2 days and one night, I now know the following things about Toronto:
1. The women in Toronto are somewhat taller than what I think is normal, and this disrupted my tranny sensors.
2. Toronto downtown is similar to New York, but you can tell you're in Canada because it's much cleaner, the sidewalks are wide enough to drive a car on GTA style, and there's constant references to the monarchy, English spelling ("colour", "favourite", "centre") and Canadian flags all about.
3. Jeets everywhere, I can't swing a cat into Toronto without hitting a Sikh.
4. I thought I saw a troon but the other tranny watchers say it was a mimic. I'm not sure.
5. Torontonians strongly prefer beer to wine based on the selection at area markets.
6. Performative French that nobody needs outside of Quebec.
Other than that I still know nothing about Toronto, or any other place I visited in Canada.
Day 2: We went to that island off the waterfront, which is pretty nice and relaxing, but the sun was strong and it was hot, so I inevitably caught a bit of a burn. Baby got a little bit of a burn too, even though she can tolerate more sun and tan better than I can. (I just develop freckle spots and future skin cancer.) There was a Hare Krishna festival on the island so by the time we called it quits at 11 a.m. the ferry was absolutely chockablock with people, most of them jeets in formalwear. I do not envy them that trip - we got lucky and the ferry was mostly empty on our inbound and outbound trip. There were some ducklings that made me very happy to watch. So pretty much a normal public parks experience, and if you'd stripped off all the Canada branding and excessive jeets I would have trouble discerning I wasn't in America to be honest.
After this we drove to a restaurant called Congee Queen out in North York, which is I guess a suburb of Toronto to meet some family friends. I liked the food here, we had the seafood congee and some roasted char siu and fried oysters, but according to my in laws these people we were visiting take them to Congee Queen every single time they meet up, so they have become tired of this restaurant. I can't relate to that. Once I find a place that serves stuff I like I will go back there and order the same thing very often. If it ain't broke... why fix it? I did start to feel a stomachache because like most Chinese meals there's a ton of courses and my ability to eat a lot of food at once is restricted by the Zepbound. I felt better after a couple hours though.
Following dinner we checked into a Holiday Inn in a totally nondescript location outside of Toronto. This was the same as the Holiday Inn in Ganonoque (Gan on o quey?) except they charged us $19 CAD per adult for basically the same hotel breakfast that the other HI had included complimentary. The breakfast potatoes were a dead ringer for the ones I'd tried two days before anyway and every other product was basically the same if not exactly the same. Scam. We visited Lake Ontario before bed, the beach there was very stony and the water very cold and clear.
Day 3: After waking up in the industrial wasteland Somewhere Northwest of Toronto, we had the aforementioned noncomplimentary breakfast. I grabbed some apples and oranges for later which makes me feel slightly better about the price. Also the baby drank like 10-15 coffee creamers in the wee plastic cups which was pretty cute and probably not cost effective for the hotel. We then got our asses into gear for a VERY long drive. We drove around Lake Ontario until we got to Niagara Falls. We stopped at Niagara Falls for about an hour and a half to look at the falls. The view's definitely better from the Canadian side, and that might be the only thing Canada does better than the United States. Watching the water fall is oddly mesmerizing. There were more attractions I would have liked to see, and like Ganonoque (Gay no no key?) I would have enjoyed another day or two to take it all in. But the ride from the border to Boston is extremely long, so we made tracks. I actually had a harder time with the questions to get us back into the United States than I did leaving it. The border guy ordered me to remove my sunglasses and asked us tricky questions about where we live. I had to give him the long version of the story about our living arrangements, but he did let us go without storming the car like that pissed off Mountie did to my in laws a few months ago. (They're real savvy travelers so I have no idea what they said or did that got them detained for over an hour and the car searched over like it did. Maybe someone was just having a bad day?)
The ride back from Niagara Falls to Boston was eight and a half hours, but fortunately we got back just before dark.
6/10 trip, kind of boring now that I read it over but better than loafing about at home.
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