Toronto Toe Woe

Day 13 - August 9th

We'd initially considered spending some of the morning in Montreal but after the experiences of the day before it really didn't seem appealling so we made an early start for Toronto instead. This was the longest journey yet, clocking in at

nearly 400 miles but was highway all the way so it only took a manageable 6 hours. On the way we stopped at Tim Hortons for timbits (mini-donuts). I'm fairly sure there's a law that you can't visit Canada without going to Tim Hortons - Canadians certainly seem keen, there are even more of them here than Starbucks or McDonalds and you can even get an iPhone app to locate the nearest one (there was a whole segment on the news about it!).

Anyway, with our sweet tooth satisfied we arrived in Toronto in the mid-afternoon. We'd booked a table at the CN Tower restaurant (it's a very touristy thing to do but buying a main course gets you free access to the tower, which normally costs $27 dollars per-person, so it's actually not a bad deal) so the plan was to walk into downtown along the lakefront before dinner. However, when we left our room we noticed that the rain had followed us from Montreal so we got a drink in the hotel bar and watched people rushing around in the downpour, getting slowly wetter (and many of their clothes quite see-through, crikey!).

Once the storm had passed we started on our walk, which was much less graffiti/litter/tramp-ridden than the day before. The only problem came in the shape of Amy's chosen shoes, which were clearly not the same shape as her feet and by half way had resulted in at least 2 bleeding toes (why do women do this to themselves?). Eventually though we walked/hobbled to the tower and got the elevator up to the 115th floor for dinner.

The restuarant rotates every 72 minutes which is slow enough that you wouldn't notice, except for the fact that the windows don't rotate and instead travel past at about one pane a minute. It's a slightly disconcerting effect but the views were stunning enough that it didn't matter. We were lucky that the weather had cleared so we could actually see a decent distance - I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be in the tower during the earlier lightning storm either. The food was also of a pleasingly high standard and hailing a cab at the end of the evening was so easy that we accidentally hailed two, oops!