Rich Boy’s Man Cave

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This morning we’ve got tickets for Toronto’s iconic gothic revival style mansion, Casa Loma, and then this afternoon we plan to head to the beach. … well that was the idea, but we look out the window at grey skies and rain, which might put paid to the bit about the beach. The beach we planned to go to was at Scarborough Bluffs a few kilometres further along Lake Ontario's shoreline. We saw some Torontians lying in the sand sunning themselves on the shoreline near our apartment a few days ago, but noticed that none of them were looking all that keen on going anywhere near the water. Yesterday we found out why; it’s apparently way too cold even for winter-hardened Canadians. Hang on, it’s still liquid, so it can’t be all that cold, and anyway I thought Canadians wore their immunity to the cold as a badge of honour. We don’t particularly want to die of hypothermia today, or of anything else for that matter, so maybe it’s just as well it’s raining.

Casa Loma’s about five kilometres north of our apartment on the outskirts of the CBD. It’s on the top of a hill and its gothic towers are a bit hard to miss as we make our way up out of the subway. We learn that it was built between 1911 and 1914 by wealthy Canadian financier Sir Henry Pellatt. It’s got a whopping 98 rooms, and at the time it was built it was the largest private residence in Canada. It’s now described as an “historic house museum”.

We head down to the basement to grab some coffee. The walls are lined with posters from movies that were apparently made here, and there seem to be an awful lot of them. If this is anything to go by we’re probably lucky the place was open today and not closed to film something - “X Men”, “The Pacifier”, “The Handmaid's Tale”, ”Scott Pilgrim versus the World” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, to name just a few. We wander into the indoor swimming pool which was used in the scene from “The Pacifier” in which Vin Diesel had to dive into a sewer. At least they now seem to have cleaned it out. They’ve also dried it out; it’s now a small theatre.

The mansion is massive and spectacular, and doubles as a military museum. I make my way slowly up towards the Norman Tower; three flights of normal stairs, followed by a struggle up two very narrow spiral staircases, which end in…. well a locked door. It might have been nice to know about that a bit earlier.

I head back down into the basement and follow a passageway which leads to the entrance to a dark narrow tunnel. I think this might have been the master of the house’s passage into his man cave; one of the side tunnels looks suspiciously like the door to a bar. If they’re trying to cheer me up as I make my way slowly along the here they’re not doing a particularly good job. The walls are lined with depressing pictures of the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, which apparently destroyed much of downtown. … and if that wasn’t enough the next series is of the so-called Toronto “plague years” from 1912 to 1922 - extreme poverty, diseased cattle, typhoid fever - the whole depressing shooting match. Several hundred metres later the tunnel emerges into daylight again, and it seems I’m now a couple of blocks from the mansion. That seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a man cave, but I suspect money might not have been too much of an object for old Sir Henry. Anyway there’s a vintage car collection here, and stables, and wax works figures from a lot of the movies that were filmed here.

We have lunch and Michael and I head off to the Ice Hockey Hall of Fame. Now if Canadians love their baseball, their devotion to hockey seems to take things to the next almost religious level. The place is massive and full of devoted hockey fans. I’m feeling very out of place, like I‘ve suddenly realised that I’ve come to the wrong temple. The Holy Grail of hockey is the iconic trophy known as the Stanley Cup. This is housed in a vault in the oldest part of the complex, a 1940s looking building with a spectacular domed glass ceiling. The vault has metre thick brick and concrete walls, and a steel door with a complex lock structure that looks like it belongs in Fort Knox. But despite all this, the Cup isn’t there at the moment. It’s just been won so it’s doing a tour of the wilds of Colorado with the winning team. The vault doesn’t go with it, which has apparently led to a few interesting stories over the years. We read that one team accidentally left it on the side of the road when they stopped to change a tyre on the team bus. Fortunately it was still there when they came back to look for it the next morning.…

We’re starting to feel more than a tad melancholy. Emma and Michael head back to Alberta tomorrow while we make our way across the pond to Europe, so we head out for a final sushi dinner.

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