travel dates: June, 2024
By the end of our first day in Toronto, I’d had an epiphany: the second “t” in Toronto is silent. “Just like Atlanta!” I thought.
Also like Atlanta, Toronto can feel sort of…generic big city-esque. There are tall buildings, and people hurrying around doing business things, and they’re not always as friendly as you want them to be (we had more than one, “we’re not in Newfoundland anymore” moment in Toronto). SOMETIMES they even cut in the very long ferry line on the Toronto Islands. For example. NOT COOL. Where was I? Right! Toronto. We had a few experiences, pre-trip, where we’d tell actual Canadians of our summer plans, and they would seem a little confused that we were stopping in Toronto.
Here is where perhaps I’ve led you to expect a big twist where we loved Toronto so much! I don’t really have a twist like that to offer: we liked a lot of things about Toronto (examples: Toronto regularly lands at the top of big city rankings both for its diversity and its safety, and safety and diversity are two things we really like) and were not such big fans of other things. And, of course, we only had two days here! We are far from Toronto experts! But we definitely found some things that we loved, and, as is often the case, we found that we had great experiences when we tried to go beyond the most obvious touristy things and dig a little deeper.
More on that: you won’t see the CN Tower in this post. Well, except in this paragraph. Going to the top of the CN Tower is really expensive…like $45 CAD per person. Wait–scratch that–that’s not actually to go to the top: that’s how much it costs to go…near the top. Going all the way to the top adds an extra $10 or so. Anyway, we opted not to go up in the CN Tower because it didn’t seem like the best use of our limited time/funds. I’m fascinated, incidentally, by how getting up high is such a thing in so many cities. We didn’t do the London Eye, either. Perhaps we’re making a terrible mistake. Perhaps I’m pretending it’s about economics when really I’m scared of heights. I don’t know! I did go up in the Gateway Arch in St. Louis recently, though, and it’s an awful lot cheaper. So there’s that. Last CN Tower appearance in this post:
So what did we do?
Royal Ontario Museum
I was pretty excited about the Royal Ontario Museum largely because, back in Newfoundland, we read about how the museum was the final resting place of a blue whale that washed up on the shore in Trout River in 2014. A team from the ROM came out to salvage the whale carcass and transport it to Ontario. We’d been looking forward to seeing that whale for a full year, so, toward the end of our visit to the ROM, we asked a volunteer where we might find it. Yeah…no whale. Turns out the whale was only there for a few months back in 2017 and is now part of a traveling exhibit that goes to different museums. We can see it in Raleigh, NC later this year!
Despite this disappointment, we really enjoyed our visit. This is one of those giant museums that has some of everything (oh look: it sums it up right there on the side of the building: “The arts of man through all the years.” That’s so much art and years!) Wikipedia tells me that it’s a museum of art, world culture, and natural history, and that it’s the largest museum in Canada. This all sounds about right to me. Basically, it’s a huge place, so don’t expect to see it all in one visit.
In fact, I highly recommend doing a guided tour for a first visit. We happened to show up shortly before the 45 minute “museum highlights” tour started, hopped on that, and were very glad we did. The tours are included with admission, require no reservations, and are conducted by trained volunteers. Our tour guide was great; she was clearly really passionate about what she was doing, and did a great job telling the stories behind the things she showed us and tying them together thematically.
We got in free here thanks to some reciprocal membership or other, which made us feel a little better about how little of the museum we actually saw. We spent some time wandering around the China and Korea galleries while we waited for our tour, went on our tour, then saw the toy soldier collection, because we love whimsy:
Oh, and we saw very tall totem poles, which Dave was quite taken with. I think maybe I already posted this picture of him pretending to be one somewhere earlier:
And at that point, some of us would have been happy exploring more, but some of us were 11 and ready for lunch.
I wasn’t entirely happy with how we handled Toronto restaurants. On this day we opted to go to Amsterdam Brewhouse, which is right on the water and pretty touristy. We enjoyed it, but it wasn’t really anywhere near the other places we were going that day. We took public transportation into and around Toronto both days that we went (I talk more about that process in the post about our campground for this stop), but we didn’t necessarily understand the most efficient ways to use it. Toronto has an extensive network that includes subways, streetcars, and buses. I thought maybe we could get away with sticking to the subway and not trying to figure out the other parts….and we could, but it made for a lot of extra walking.
So to get to the restaurant, we took the subway to Union Station and then walked a long way. It was kind of a nice walk, with views of the CN Tower and all that at least. So then after we ate we decided to attempt the streetcar. This was…an experience. First we couldn’t really figure out how to pay, and, honestly, I’m not sure we did pay for all of us. But we tried! And then! There was a weird incident where a guy was picking loud fights with everyone on the streetcar and threatening to shoot people. “Who wants to see a mass shooting?!” he shouted repeatedly. He explained (also loudly) that he was American, so that was…nice. Good to meet some folks from back home! Anyway, Toronto is famously very safe, so I’m sure our experience was an anomaly, but it was also really unsettling and we were very happy to get to our stop and get off the streetcar.
Our last stop on this first day was the Bata Shoe Museum. This is pretty much what it sounds like, which is to say it’s a museum about shoes. Also it was a Sunday, and it’s free on Sundays, so it was another place where we felt fine popping in for a little while but not covering the whole museum. At this point it was getting late in the day and Abe was fairly museumed-out.
Apparently there was a woman, Sonja Bata, who really loved shoes and collected so many shoes that she ran out of room for them and had to open a museum. My favorite part of this museum was the first exhibit we came to, which gave a kind of timeline of the history of shoes. So there’s that and then some rotating exhibits on assorted themes (right now there’s one on crime and footwear, for example) and also a big area that’s just kind of, “look at this cool shoe!” At one point I exclaimed, “it’s like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but for shoes!”
We only spent about 45 minutes here in the end…it was definitely an interesting museum and worth a visit; if it hadn’t been so late I would have loved to learn all about crime and footwear, but that will have to wait for another time.
Day 2 in Toronto was less about museums and more about wandering all over the place. Ever since we went to England a few years ago and did a few of these Treasure Trails, I’ve tried to find ways to replicate the experience on this side of the Atlantic. Sadly, I’ve never really found anything we’ve liked as much (I suspect the problem is more the types of cities we have over here than the design of the games; the UK is just better suited to purposeful wandering through quaint little streets). So my latest attempt was Adventure City Games…they sell online scavenger hunt type games for several cities in Canada and are expanding into the US. We tried out three of these all together; Toronto was the first and probably our favorite.
There’s a very loose storyline to the games, involving stopping some sort of crime, solving a mystery, etc…(my notes read, “I think we saved capitalism”) but mostly you walk around a city or neighborhood solving puzzles. The idea is that you get to see some cool stuff that you wouldn’t likely come across on your own. Like, for example, this fun dog fountain!
Or this tiny skyline someone had drawn on the sidewalk:
This all happens over your phone, so you need to make sure yours is fully charged (and probably bring along a charger); the technology end of things worked really smoothly for us. We saw nice churches:
And ended up in a very downtown area in an urban park (the name of which I don’t remember):
And then, for our last big Toronto thing, we took the ferry over to Toronto Island Park, specifically to Centre Island. Toronto Island Park is made up of several islands in Lake Ontario and serves as a big park for the city, with bike paths and picnic areas and beaches and tons of other recreational stuff.
I think at some point I had a vision of us bringing bikes with us and riding all over the place here, but we ended up not bringing bikes on the summer trip at all. As it was, we just kind of wandered around Centre Island, which was…nice, but maybe not really worth the hassle of getting over there. The ferry is inexpensive, but it was only running every 40 minutes while we were there, and it was very crowded. On the way back, a lot of people got left behind and had to wait another 40 minutes for the next ferry (after already waiting in line a long time). You can also take a water taxi, which is more expensive, but no doubt much more convenient (and you can bring dogs that way!)
We had heard there were great views of the Toronto skyline here, and that was one reason we decided to make the trip (since we were skipping the CN Tower views):
We ate a picnic lunch here, along with some very overpriced drinks from the Subway, and then we walked around a lot. There’s a small amusement park on Centre Island, and Dave and Abe did the very short log flume here:
This was definitely more of a young kid place; had we had just Abe with us (or better yet, two younger kids) we probably would have bought a pass for unlimited rides and turned him loose. But as it was, August was not at all interested in the rides, so it was a bit of a bust for our particular configuration. For a family with all little kids, it would be a blast.
The little farm adjacent to the amusement park was probably a bigger hit with my kids, largely thanks to this very friendly cat:
Then we walked over to the beach area to check out the views of Lake Ontario. There’s also a nude beach over here! We did not go there.
After this, all that remained was a long line and a ferry ride back to the city, followed by a long trek on the subway/train/roads back to the campground. It was a long day.
Next up: Kingston!
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