Reliving Canada
After all those journeys to Europe and a couple of forays into Central and South America, Celine and I thought we should give this great continent of North America at least a chance to show its mettle. Son Number One recently took the bold step of moving his family from south California to South Carolina and my brother-in-law, always on the lookout for value-for-money housing, kept saying how wonderful the Carolinas appeared to be. Then someone else mentioned how popular the little city of Asheville NC was becoming, what a wonderful climate it had and the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside. Thus with the seed of an idea to travel east well and truly sown, an invitation to an 80thbirthday party in my old hometown of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario gave us just the catalyst we needed to start planning another little jaunt, one week reliving my old memories, and a second week exploring places completely new to both of us.
April beside Lake Ontario was never a guarantee of warm weather and North Carolina was a complete unknown so we packed assuming we might see some snow initially and would perhaps need a little sunblock later on. Climate Change was on our side this time and we were spared that final wintry blast that I remembered of old. Indeed there was sunshine enough to produce a small rainbow in the mist of the Niagara Falls, though small icebergs, remnants of the heavy freeze-up of recent months, were still making the death-defying leap over the edge and a lace of ice and snow decorated the fallen rocks along the gorge below the falls. The city of Niagara Falls continues to grow, with new hotels lining the edge of the escarpment above the never-ending crowds of tourists jostling for position along the railing, each one hoping to catch the perfect selfie to join the millions of other nearly identical pictures on Facebook.
Visiting the past can be painful and I was unsure what emotions I would feel being so close to the house where I had watched my sons grow into manhood, and which still contained so many memories of our past family life together. But when we pulled up outside what had once been my driveway and found no-one at home, we happily wandered around the old estate and admired the changes made since my departure, as I realised that the past is simply a part of what makes me the person I am today and is something I should enjoy without fear. We even had afternoon tea with my old neighbours as if nothing had really changed!
A few days staying in Burlington with old friends also helped to soften the experience and readied us for what was a novelty for me, three days of sightseeing in Toronto. It’s funny how one can live close to a large city for so long only to realise some years later how little one actually knows about the place. My excuse as far as Toronto is concerned is that I was always far too busy trying to make a business work whilst raising a family, looking after a very old house and tending the couple of acres it sat on. But the real truth is I don’t have a great love of cities, full-stop. What I do have however, and share with Celine, is an enjoyment of museums, art galleries and general wandering around new surroundings, and so it was with some surprise that I realised what a nice place Toronto is to do those things. When I lived in Canada people often told me that the city was really a conglomeration of small villages and didn’t seem like a big city at all. Well, times have changed and downtown Toronto most definitely has a big city feel about it, what with the enormous amount of new and very high high-rise building that has taken place in the last few decades. Wanting to be ‘nice and central’ we had found ourselves an AirBnB apartment on the 35thfloor of one of the many ‘little’ skyscrapers that have sprung up, this one being at the junction of Front and John Streets. Living at such a great height was an unusual experience for both of us. The promised wonderful views were fine if you like looking at other tall buildings, though they were indeed rather beautiful when lit up at night; the ‘beautiful lake vista’ however was only visible if you knew exactly where to look and between which buildings it could be sighted; but it was well placed, ten minutes walk from Union Station, five from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were just starting the new baseball season, and even less to the CN Tower from which one does indeed get a superb 360degree vista of the lakeside city. Sadly the Leafs had just got knocked out of the end-of-season playoffs so I didn’t get a chance to stomp and holler my encouragement to that ‘great’ ice-hockey team that we followed with such enthusiasm when the boys were growing up as young Canadians.
Still museums are our thing. To start off our three days as tourists in the city we spent an afternoon enjoying the fine art collection in the Art Gallery of Ontario. I particularly appreciated the works of the Group of Seven, artists who decided that Canada needed its own art to dignify its place in the world; and we both liked the renovated Dundas Street façade designed by Frank Gehry – who went on to design the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao amongst other great buildings. Our walk back from there took us through Toronto’s China Town, an area still dominated by two storey homes with small front and back gardens, where trees flourished and greenery prevailed, enabling us to understand those past comments about the neighbourliness of Toronto life. We stopped in the “Lucky Moose Food Mart” for one or two basics, enjoyed an extremely delicious vegetarian burger at “Fresh”, and then found “Fresh and Wild”, a well-stocked organic grocery which answered all of Celine’s wildest foodie dreams. And thus suitably fortified and our larder replete, we took a ride up to the top of the CN Tower to enjoy the sunset and the lights of the city coming on as darkness fell.
For whatever reason, the next day we decided to forego another museum visit and take ourselves to Toronto’s largest tourist attraction by visitor numbers, namely the Eaton Centre, now no longer owned and operated by the eponymous department store chain started by Timothy Eaton in the 19thcentury, but by the faceless multi-billion dollar commercial real estate operation Cadillac Fairview Corporation. Well I guess everyone has to go shopping sometime and to do so in a building partly inspired by a galleria in Milan, Italy, is a better way to do it than most. And luckily for us, Lucky Brand had a sale on, and they had some different lines from our local store in Long Beach CA, so our shopping expedition was not wasted.
Our third day in Toronto was meant to be our last and we opted to visit Casa Loma, a Gothic Revival style mansion, or faux castle, constructed for financier Sir Henry Pellatt at the start of the 20thcentury, and which eventually helped in that gentleman’s financial downfall when he found how much tax he owed to the city fathers. Totally pretentious, it is nonetheless a fascinating example of one man showing his feathers off to his fellow citizens and then falling out of the tree, and occupied us gainfully for another few hours on what had turned out to be a rather drizzly cold wet day. Thank goodness for Uber when the weather proves uncooperative; in spite of the heavy traffic we were back downtown in plenty of time to collect our bags from the safe hands of the concierge in the International Hotel and to take the UP train to Lester Pearson Airport for our evening flight to Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina.
But it was not to be . . . Bad weather had totally disrupted flights up and down the east coast, including ours, and we found ourselves spending the night in the fairly decent Hampton Inn and Suites Hotel adjacent to the runway we should have been taking off from, and rebooked on a flight for not the following morning but the day after. So Saturday saw us not making our way to our mountain top retreat in Asheville, but with time on our hands to do one more tourist thing in somewhat cooler and much less greener Toronto. We took the UP train back into town and walked the mile or so up to the Royal Ontario Museum where we spent most of our stay fascinated by The “Royal Arts of Jodhpur”. Mainly a history of the Rathore Dynasty, with lots of Indian art through the centuries, this temporary exhibit gave us a marvellous insight into the privileged life of India’s very rich and powerful, aided and abetted by British colonialism of course. Otherwise the Museum was only so-so, not very well organised and nothing of very much interest to a pair of well-travelled Europeans who have already seen, if not all of it, a lot of it. The ride back to the UP station at the end of the afternoon was a less than wonderful experience as the Uber driver seemed to have more interest in his passengers than in watching the road. Still at least we had the cab to ourselves, instead of sharing it, as we did a couple of days previously, with the rather frightening ‘gentleman’ who smelled of goodness knows what, and caused our very dapper driver to apologise profusely for his presence once he had left; a good reason for us to avoid shared rides in the future.
A final journey with UP to the airport and one more night in the Hampton Hotel and the next morning we were safely on our way, flying above the rather cloudy skies of north-eastern USA to explore another state, of which I will tell more in my next post.