Blogs from Canada, North America - page 5

My alarm went off at 6:30 and I kept snoozing it until 7:00. Mike is always up way before me. He gets his coffee going, makes his toast (warm, dry bread), and feeds Charlie. After Charlie finishes his breakfast he has gotten into the habit of jumping up on the bed and going back to sleep ... tight against my head! Our routine of breaking camp went smoothly. So smoothly in fact that we left 15 minutes ahead of schedule. I could have hit that snooze button three more times! Just before we left, while Mike was in the park's bathroom, I showed Dave the giant bug that pinged off Mike's arm yesterday. It was still in the door cubby where it landed after I shook out my blanket. Dave said, "Yeah, that's a giant fly. ... read more

Holding my breath, I pressed the bottom of the rocker switch to retract the bedroom slide. It came in flawlessly. One down, one to go. After making sure everything was ready for travel I pressed the identical button to bring in the living room slide. I suppose it's really a dining room or kitchen slide because it houses the dining booth and pantry. Regardless, I pushed the button and the slide came in as if nothing happened last night. Yay! Wish we could figure out why the circuit keeps tripping. We only had a 200 mile drive today so mid-afternoon was our ETA. It always depends on road conditions and stops. Because of that, Teri adds two hours onto whatever Google maps shows as an arrival time. She's been pretty close every time. We were toolin' ... read more

The Niagara Falls After we left Toronto it meant that we were coming near the end of our visit in Canada. But we still had one thing left in Canada we wanted to see - the Niagara Falls. Well, you might argue that the Niagara Falls is not in Canada but rather on the border between Canada and the United States. But since we thought that the view of the waterfalls were much better from the Canadian side than from USA we feel that it is more Canadian than American. It is not often that Ake is overwhelmed by sites that he visits. But when he first saw the Niagara Falls he totally lost it and started to laugh because he found the site so amazing. The size and the amount of water and the scenery ... 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

Wall art en masse When you are viewing this blog entry we can strongly recommend that you click on the photos to enlarge them. The pictures come out a lot better when they are enlarged than they do when viewed in the size they appear in the blog. On our way back to Montreal we stopped for a few hours in the city Sherbrooke. We went there to see Trompe-l'œil art because we had heard that they have plenty of such artworks throughout the city. I let Wikipedia explain what Trompe-l'œil art is: "Trompe-l'œil is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Trompe l'œil, which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving painted objects or spaces as real. Forced perspective is ... read more