Our Experience in Toronto
5:50PM, February 15, 2008 - [ Permalink]
This is a rambler, folks, so either skip this or get comfortable. ;-)
The train trip from Ottawa to Toronto was about 30 minutes late, apparently due to another passenger train itself being late - enough that our next trip we get 50% off a portion of our next trip, if I understand it correctly, which I think is fair.
I do however, have a complaint; $8.95 for wi-fi access that barely works? Come on, our hotel has free wifi, so why shouldn't the train? Just raise the ticket price by $1 per person and offer it for free to everyone.
As some of you may remember, my first impression of Montreal was that it smelled like an ashtray. Well, Toronto smells like pot. We got off the train, walked through Union Station and walked out into a cloud of pot smoke. Ah, first impressions.
We walked down Front Street to Bay Street, and the cut over to Yonge Street, and walked up to our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott. The check in process was fast and easy, and the fellow behind the counter asked if we had our laptop with us - and then gave us the wireless password for our free wifi (take a hint, Via).
We went to our room, dropped our (heavy) bags, I logged into the 'Net, checked my email, fired off a Tweet, and headed out in search of dinner.
We ended up walking all the way down Yonge to the Eaton Centre, which oddly enough, no longer contains an Eatons store, and wandered around a little bit before finding the Apple Store.
The Apple Store is an experience itself. They have *everything* in stock, and Tracey played with the iPod Touch that I'm aiming at getting myself, and then I showed her the computer I will (likely) replace her Mac mini with - a MacBook, that she promptly lifted up high enough to uncouple the power adapter which set off an alarm.
Fortunately, the Apple Store employee was over quickly and fixed the problem, saying that it was his new favorite song. The same thing happened at least once more (not caused by us, however) while we were in the store, so I imagine it happens quite frequently. I picked up a six port Firewire hub (yay!), walked around, marveling at the software and hardware available, and walked out of the store, without having maxed out my credit card.
We walked back up Yonge Street, and settled on a little place called "The One - Asian and Thai Cuisine". The food was excellent - Tracey had the tropical chicken and I had the bbq chicken noodles.
After dinner, we walked back to the hotel and crashed, watching TV. Imagine our surprise when we found nothing on. Well, that isn't quite true - we watched the last half of some show called.. Earthsea. Never heard of it before, but I suppose it has some potential.
I slept in Saturday morning, but Tracey, being the early-riser that she is, got up quite early and went for a swim, showered and had time to read a chunk of the paper before I even began to wake up.
We went for a rather late breakfast in one of the restaurants in the hotel and went back to the room to veg out for a while. Well, actually, Tracey watched TV and I desperately worked on finalizing my questions for Rob's interview for Speaking of Ottawa (yes, believe it or not I'm still working on that... albeit slowly).
We were picked up by Lou and Maggie who I both "know" online from the RJ mailing list and we drove off winding our way through Toronto traffic to Robert Sawyer's place. Thanks Lou!
The party deserves its own post, so I'll likely toss that up after this one. In short, a good time was had.
We got back to the hotel around ten, I think. Thanks again to Lou for the ride - that was totally awesome of you! It was early enough that we (Tracey and I) decided to go downstairs to the "other" place in the hotel for a quiet drink, however, in short order, the place filled up with some rather noisy folks, so we finished our drinks and went back up stairs.
Figure in some futzing around on the 'Net, and then we watched the last half of the movie Triple-X with Vin Diesel (I think that's his name), and was rather surprised that it didn't completely suck.
More sleep. Tracey swam again while I slept. I guess I needed to catch up on sleep some. ;-) I got up earlier this time, and slowly started to pack things up.
We checked out of the hotel, zipped up our coats and went out into the cold (-22°C w/ windchill) and began our meanderings towards the Kensington market for a look-see. We wandered past the Ontario Art Gallery, which we had considered going to, but it turns out that it was closed.
Originally, our destination was Courage my Love, a store that Tracey has dealt with from time to time for getting coin belts to sell at the Dancer's Bazaar, so we thought it would be neat to drop in and check the place out, but at first, we couldn't find them - the street numbers don't line up on either side of the street, so it was further down the street than we thought, but we did pop into two little places; an eco shoppe that we can't remember the name of and the place right next door to it called Dancing Days who was just opening and invited us in. Tracey bought a dress there, and Aeshna had her photo taken there (and in a mess of other places around town).
We wandered about some more, and started to look for somewhere for lunch. We had passed Espresso etc on our way to Kensington, and Tracey though it would be worth trying out, my backpack weighting heavily on my, I readily agreed.
I had a good feeling when we walked in and I saw the owner sitting by the window at his 20 inch iMac. We ordered some sandwiches (tomatoes, bacon and mayo). Even better was when I found out that he had not just one, but four types of apple cider. I ordered the spicy, and Tracey had the red delicious cider. When we finished, we had a great chat with the owner before heading on our way to the Eaton Centre to have another look at the Apple Store.
Holy smokes, the Apple store was full of people! Probably the store with the most people in it in the whole mall. I had to wait a few minutes to get my hands on a MacBook Air. And *wow*. It must be half the weight of my MacBook Pro. When they say it is thin, they aren't kidding. If I travelled more, I would certainly consider it... or a 12 inch powerbook.
We then headed out of the mall and to the train station where we arrived rather early, so we dumped our backpacks with the helpful Via personnel (now that they got rid of the convenient lockers due to the threat/fear/paranoia over terrorism), and walked over to the CN Tower. When we found out it would cost over $45 for the two of us to go up to the top, we decided not to bother.
The train was quite late in getting boarded - we were supposed to entrain at 5:15, they announced two delays of twenty minutes each, and then didn't announce the final fifteen minute delay. The good news was that once we were on the train, we were underway within ten minutes.
Funny things you see on the train; the names of the various computers in the area when you have your wifi on (about 50% were Macs). Two even had their iTunes music sharing turned on; sometimes, you just have to wonder..
Of the seven computers I could see in iStumbler's Bonjour browser, 5 were Macs and two were PCs running iTunes. Two phones and one computer had bluetooth on, and surprisingly, nearly 75% of the wifi networks we encountered (houses and businesses near the railway) had secured wifi connections - good for you!
We pulled into Ottawa only about twenty minutes late, took the 95 to Ottawa U and walked home in the chilly Ottawa air, and enjoyed our first night's sleep at home. You can find more photos from the trip over at Flickr and you should be able to click the images in this post to take you to the corresponding location on Flickr.
