Blogs from Ontario, Canada, North America

Let's just say we are glad we don't live anywhere near Toronto because of the traffic. We arrived here in Niagara Falls by 4. Had dinner with Ted & Jane Guthrie and Keith & Pauline Mueller in prep for tomorrow's Marriage Encounter. The weather was lovely - like 70 - so we walked down to the Falls after dinner. Hence these photos. This is probably the end of this blog. We will be WAY too busy with the M.E. event, having blessings heaped on us and, we pray, 11 couples, 2 anniversary couples, and the other 3 presenting couples. Back home on Sunday night.... read more

Toronto was only one day of our two week itinerary, and our time was largely spent in its museums and restaurants. We started our day at the Royal Ontario Museum, the largest and most visited museum in Canada with exhibits of art, Canadian and world culture, and natural history, including dinosaurs! The ROM demanded a full day on its own but then we wouldn’t have been able to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario, the second largest art museum in Toronto, with outstanding works by Canadian, First Nations and Inuit artists, among others. A particular revelation was the artwork from the Group of Seven, once known as the Algonquin School, a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933. I didn’t understand Canadian art until my fourth trip to the country when I finally visited ... read more

Saturday, August 26 For the first time, we went to the Canadian War Museum. The museum is organized by eras. We skipped the earliest eras because two tour groups were just getting started there. I thought we could go back later, but we ran out of time. They were about the First Nations and the advent of Europeans; it would have been interesting to see how the history was written. Truthfully, throughout the main galleries much of the text on the signs was too generalized to be really informative, conveying only the broad strokes of accepted history. Women’s roles were faintly described, too often mentioning clerical positions in uniform and keeping up the home out of uniform. Missing entirely was the crucial role women played in ferrying all makes of aircraft from Canada to Britain. I ... read more

Toronto doesn't look like Manhattan. But we like it anyway We once heard that Toronto often is used as filming location for movies and TV-series where scenes from Manhattan are needed. Apparently it is very expensive to actually shoot in Manhattan. So instead they go to Canada, where it is far less expensive, and in Toronto it is possible to make it look like Manhattan. So when we arrived in Toronto we expected to find a city that looks like Manhattan. Our expectations weren't met because Toronto doesn't look like Manhattan at all. But it was a nice city anyway. Downtown and City Hall We wouldn't call Nathan Phillips Square, the Toronto sign and the city hall the city centre. But it... read more

Terry Fox is a big inspiration to runners and to non-runners After spending a few days in Montreal we were ready to leave. We decided to rent a car a few days to allow us some sightseeing outside the major cities. Here follows a short description of the various places we visited the next few days of our vacation. Brockville Our first stop was in the town Brockville, a small town south of Ottawa. We had heard that they in town have a spectacular railway tunnel, Brockville Tunnel. After we had seen some pictures of it we knew that we had to visit this tunnel. The tunnel is about half a kilometre long and begins and ends in central Brockville. It is the first railway tunnel in Canada and was in active use from 1860 to ... read more