Meanwhile, Back in Toronto...

My Saturday pretty much disappeared down a sink-hole of waiting at a very busy tire place for them to get to my ‘non-appointment’ tire needs. Around lunchtime I finally dropped just over $300 on two tires. One to replace the puncture and one to be an actual spare as opposed to the completely useless ‘emergency tire’ we were carrying. While I was there, Jane took the kids for a bit of a walk around downtown Toronto and for a ride on the subway. Lillian’s nap took over the afternoon, and then for Jane's birthday dinner we ate just down the street at a ‘Red Lobster’ which was surprisingly good. The kids had big cups of milk and tasty pieces of baked chicken with some nicely steamed fresh broccoli. They also really enjoyed seeing the actual lobster in the big tank by the door. And then it was back to the still too-hot room to put the kids to bed.

Sunday we went to the National Gallery of Ontario to see the King Tut exhibit, which was very cool. It also had great acoustics, as my less interested children demonstrated, with the result that we got to see the exhibit rather more quickly than we would have liked. After that we walked around the gallery a bit and had a snack in the cafeteria. Late in the visit we discovered the new children’s room, so I stayed there with the kids to give Jane freedom to wander the gallery for the last half hour we were there. Then Jane took Lillian back to the room for her nap while Tom and I went to get a new GPS. Congrats honey! ...for your birthday you get two tires plus labour and a still not coin-operated GPS, all for apx $500. Yay.

Monday, ‘home at last’ day. Just the small matter of a 5 hour drive with 2 small kids, but 1st a stop at the Toronto Zoo. This was the best part of the trip, but even so there were disappointments. Many of the African animals (Tom’s favourites) weren’t out yet, and Jane saw a ‘tentacled water snake’. To be honest, it would have been more aptly named the ‘mustachioed snake’, but I guess tentacled sounds better. The biggest disappointment of the visit would have to have been Lillian’s. We walked around a corner to the baboon viewing window, revealing a big hill covered with frolicking baboons, and her little face fell like a stone. She had thought we were going to see ‘balloons’. I would never have imagined a child could be so disappointed with actual monkeys.

And if you are wondering why there are no pictures of this travesty of a long weekend, its because the camera battery died as soon as we reached Toronto.

I really don’t feel any need to go back to Toronto. I am sure there are plenty of things we didn’t do, but ultimately it’s a big city, we have kids, and most of the ‘big city’ things I like to do aren’t very child-friendly. Plus, for an extra three hours in the car we could have been in New York. We have been to New York and I would like to go back there. And, unlike Toronto, we know people in New York.

So yeah, I suspect that the only reason I will see Toronto again is because its on the way to Niagara.