Christina and Robert's Cross-Country Trip: Part 2, Canada

The next day we drove to Toronto via the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Thousand Islands between the US and Canada (home to many well-known cashew farms), the first and up till the Dells the most exiting go-carts of the trip, and the famously wide route 401, which was not quite as wide as we were hoping. We spent Thursday and Friday nights at a Days Inn in downtown Toronto. We found a parking lot for Norman (our 1985 Camry), and walked, took cabs, and the subway. Robert couldn't get used to the funny, discounted Canadian money and tipped a bell boy with a $5 bill, after which the bell boy fawned over us the rest of the time. I married a real big tipper, all right. In addition to thinking they invented the hot dog and to ending all their sentences with "eh?", all the Canadians use their headlights all the time, under the impression that it makes for safe driving and good business for car battery replacers.

We did not go to the Toronto shoe museum, no matter how much Robert begged. Nearby it, however, was an incredible ice cream store with great flavors like sweet cream, which tasted like frozen whipped cream, and, even better (though Robert experienced one of his anti-ice cream reactions to it), roasted marshmallow!! We ate dinner that night in a cool marketplace-cafe thing, kind of like an upscale cafeteria with homemade pasta and crepes and mango-raspberry milkshakes.

Friday we went to Casa Loma, a 1913 mansion built in a gothic revival style kind of like Tower Court by a wealthy Canadian. Some of the highlights of Casa Loma included a shower with enough jets of water to hit all of your body at once and which was large enough to accommodate Robert with room to spare; a nicely ironic sign pointing visitors to a "secret" staircase, a generally beautiful house with nice grounds and a bowling alley and swimming pool (both, sadly, unfinished) in the basement, and a great view of Toronto--city of our favorite show, Forever Knight.

We ate lunch at a really good Pan-Asian place (Peking duck quesadilla, superb homemade eggroll, and a chicken and candied walnut dish on a bed of pan-fried noodles) and dinner at a tiny Chinese place where we had a heaping platter of tiny snails in black bean sauce and soft shelled crabs with spicy salt for $30 Canadian! Wonderful, and cheap! The next day, married a week, after a good but very filling dim sum during which the waitress laughed at Robert for being too full, and still more super ice cream, we drove to Niagara Falls and stayed on the Canadian side there Saturday and Sunday.

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