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Published: October 10th 2010
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This may be a bit of a shorter blog than usual. Craig and I went out last night and had a fantastic time, but are paying for it today! The Blackhawks were playing last night and as we didn’t have a TV in our hostel room, we decided to go out to a bar to watch the ice hockey. We decided to go to Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant, Wayne Gretzky being the most famous and most talented ice hockey player that has ever played. It was a good thing we decided to go there - Wayne Gretzky’s father was there having dinner, and Craig got to have a chat to him and get a photo!
I invited one of my friends from my 2004 Contiki tour around Europe to come along. Cesar’s from Mexico but has been working in the US for a couple of years. Luckily, he only moved from San Francisco to Toronto yesterday! So the timing worked out perfectly, as yesterday was our last day in Toronto and we are on our way to Montreal today.
It was so nice seeing Cesar, as we hadn’t seen each other since the Contiki tour! We had a wonderful time,
drinking and chatting and watching the ice hockey. Cesar has even invited us to his wedding in Mexico City in November, and we’re thinking that we just might be able to work it out to go down there. It would be fantastic!
Before I talk about the rest of our time in Toronto, I should mention our last day at Niagara Falls. Craig and I had a great last day there, despite the weather. It was wet and cold, and although we had warm jackets, the rain was bothering us by the end of the day. It was a shame, as the weather prediction was for the skies to clear up.
We started off the day at the Journey Behind the Falls, where you can walk to a couple of lookout points behind the falls and get nice and close to the bottom of the Canadian falls. The best part of the day was the Cave of the Winds on the American side of the falls. After walking across Rainbow Bridge (and watching Craig horse around, jumping between Canada and America in the middle of the bridge), we headed to the Cave of the Winds. Here they give
you ponchos and sandals to wear, and you walk along a boardwalk near the bottom of the American falls. It was a lot of fun, and we got extremely wet. One part of the boardwalk was called Hurricane Deck, and you could stand close enough to the falls to have the water cascading over the top of you. Despite the cold weather, we just couldn’t let the opportunity pass to stand underneath the falls and so we did it (quite a few people were avoiding the Hurricane Deck). Thankfully the ponchos protected us, and despite rolling our jeans up our legs only our jeans got wet.
After having a walk around the American side of the falls, we headed back over to Canada and spent the rest of the afternoon playing some mini golf and pool. We had an early night in, as it had been an exhausting couple of days at the falls!
On Wednesday we caught a one and a half hour bus to Toronto. We have enjoyed Toronto, but I think we were expecting a little bit more from the city. It’s possibly due to the fact that it feels very much like being home
in Melbourne, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but we were just expecting it to be different.
Craig and I spent a bit of time apart in Toronto, as he had plenty of sporting things to go to and I needed a break from sports for a few days! He went along to an ice hockey match, a tour of the baseball stadium and to see the Hockey Hall of Fame.
(I’ll briefly mention about the baseball stadium tour, which was fairly good although the tour guide wasn’t very good. I still enjoyed the tour & seeing the Rogers Centre, which had the largest retractable roof in the world when it was built in 1989. I got to go on the field here, as they have an Astroturf surface so the grounds crews obviously aren’t worried about the grass being damaged like they do at every other ground.
Next up was the ice hockey match, which was really awesome! I saw the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. the Montreal Canadiens, in the very first match of the season. They had a lot of pre-game entertainment to kick off proceedings seeing as it was the first game, which
included the 48th Highland Bagpipe squad, which had about 50 people walking the ice playing their bagpipes. It was the 79th year they have opened Toronto’s season by doing so. Unfortunately I didn’t have great seats to the game, as they were restricted view & I couldn’t see one of the goal nets, so had to quickly flick from the live action to the jumbotron to see some shots on goal. It was a bit of a shame seeing as it cost $120 for the ticket, however it’s probably lucky I even got a ticket as Toronto & Montreal have the biggest rivalry in ice hockey! I really enjoyed the game, as it turned out to be a really close game all the way through, with Toronto winning 3-2 in the end. The atmosphere in the stadium was amazing & seeing all the banter between the Maple Leafs & Canadiens fans was really great to see. It was a fantastic time & am really looking forward to the next ice hockey game I can make it too.
I also managed to get to the Hockey Hall of Fame, which I really enjoyed. I ended up spending about 3 hours
in there, as there was so many things to see in there. There were so many historical artefacts & items that really represented the past history of ice hockey. & gave you a real sense of the game. It was awesome to see everything that I did & was my favourite museum that I have been to so far! - Craig)
I went to the Bata Shoe Museum while Craig was off at the baseball stadium tour. Unfortunately the museum wasn’t very big and didn’t have many exhibits, but the pieces that were there were interesting. The other times Craig was out and about, I had a look around a couple of the main shopping streets and malls
We went up to the CN Tower a couple of days ago. That was a little bit hairy, as the elevator going up the tower had glass doors, part of the walls were glass and even a couple of glass panels on the bottom! Craig and I were the last people to get into the elevator and so were right at the front, and were a bit freaked out on the way up! There were some great views up there,
and we made sure to stand towards the back of the elevator where we couldn’t see as much on the way down!
When we were coming out of the CN Tower, we noticed a man carrying a pirate’s hat walking in past us. That caught our attention and we looked a bit harder, only to see it was the Wiggles! They were playing a concert in Toronto that night. Fancy that, going to a different country to see some celebrities from back home!
We also went to a big castle built in the 1920’s called Casa Loma. We had a bit of difficulty finding it as we discovered that we didn’t have a very accurate map. On the way back to the train station afterwards we realised that if we had have come the other way out of the train station when we’d arrived we would have gotten there in 5 minutes instead of half an hour. Ah well!
Casa Loma was a really interesting place to have a look around. There were four levels and over 90 rooms, and we could even climb a few staircases to go up into one of the castle turrets. They’re
filming a movie there during the nights at the moment with Rachel McAdams in it, which is pretty cool! Apparently they’ve also filmed parts of Cocktail, Chicago and X-Men there, too.
We’re now in Montreal after a five and a half hour train trip & are both looking forward to an early, as last night’s drinking & late night has left us in a slightly sorry state today.
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