O Canada

There were just to many songs that I could have used, but perhaps the Canadian National Anthem is most appropriate because here we are in "The true North strong and fee"

In planning for a holiday like this one I find I set myself some key objectives and then think about other elements of the journey that might be worth doing. For this year's holiday getting to Drew's last eight states was the key, but when I looked at the route from New York to Chicago that would pick up the first five states I was left wondering which direction to take.

The obvious way to do New York to Chicago is along the I80 through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, with a turn off to go North to Michigan on the way. But this was exactly the same route I had done with my Sister and Brother in Law back in 1997. So what might be the alternative?

Well the alternative presented itself when I saw how easy it was to get from Niagara Falls to Michigan and then on to Ohio via a strip of Canada which is further south than most of the Canadian territory. As neither of us have been to the Falls, and it is such a well known geological feature, taking this route made it easy. 

So heading north to Rochester on Tuesday was only to put us in easy distance of the falls today (Wednesday). One of the things that had not struck me when I was in the UK, but did as I checked the routes for today's journey was how close Toronto was to where we are, so we decided we would see if we could add Toronto to the route for today. Not knowing for long a visit to the Falls would take we decided, pardon the pun, to 'go with the flow'.

As it turned out the map below outlines our route for today.

Rochester to London via Niagara and Toronto

   

Breakfast

After washing and drying the clothes while completing yesterday's blog, I showered, Drew bathed and we went to the breakfast room at the Quality Inn, Rochester. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts hotels in the US did not used to do breakfast in the 'bed and breakfast' mode at all. Then in the early part of the century coffee, and possibly a muffin, became available as you left the hotel - this is what we experienced in 2002. By the time we came back in 2002 quite a number of the chains had started offering breakfast as a part of their distinctive offering to get customers in. So we discovered that the Choice Hotel franchise have this offer, which has influenced some of our hotel choices to enable us to have breakfast in the hotel before we leave. On a road trip having to stop 10 minutes after you have started the day for breakfast is a bit annoying.

So breakfast was in the breakfast room of the Quality Inn, Rochester. We got there at 7.00 and I had sausage (patties not links) and egg with two bagels. Drew had something similar, but washed it all down with two Danish which looked very sticky and sweet. We had juice and coffee with breakfast and were back in the room and checked out by 7.55. The first part of the journey was along the I390 on to the I490 and then the I90 the I290 and the I190 - essentially one long road with only one real need to turn off to head for Niagara not Buffalo. at 9.25 we had arrived at Niagara, the only noticeable sights on this part of the journey were the two bridges over the Niagara as it flows either side of a place called Grand Island.

Niagara Falls USA

On arrival at Niagara we paid $10 to get entrance into the Falls Car Park and were given entrance into the State Park for that price. We left the car and walked past the visitors' centre and down to the river itself. WOW is all I can say. I know it is a cliche that places look far more amazing in reality than they do in images, but though these falls are an iconic part of my images of the USA I was not prepared for the ferocity or the power of the wide river as it meets its gorge and falls away. Coming at it from this side of the falls it appears to fall for ever, clearly walking to the side you can see where it falls too, but the impression of it falling into infinity when you first see it is amazingly strong. Drew took lots of fabulous photos with his new camera. I've selected two for the blog, but the rest can be found on Flickr. But it is the impression of immenseness that I will take with me.

Given we were about to go across the border, and petrol in Canada is more highly taxed than in the US we headed to a petrol station and filled up. $30.22 at 2,799 per gallon, 48p per litre, compared to the $1.33 - 67p a litre across the border.

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

The border crossing was quick and painless, the border guard had a few questions about why we were so far away from home, then how long we are staying in Canada - when she said "next time come for longer" I didn't mention the two weeks we had spent here in 2011 not the three week trip I am starting to plan for 2018, more of that later.

Once across the border we turned towards the Niagara State Park, Ontario - yes the Canadians have a state park on the other side of the border. It costs us Can$20 to park, £10 and the brochure we got from the Canadian Park fee was much richer than its US equivalent. 40 pages not 4.

While, having seen them first from the US side, the impact was not as great. In fact the views for the Canadian side are even more impressive. Drew was snapping happily and this selection are from the Canadian side of the Falls.

We stopped for a Coffee in a branch of Tim Horton's, a coffee shop that had become a favourite of ours during the last trip here and then using their wifi planned our route to Toronto and downloaded some information ready for our visit.

Toronto

The route from Niagara to Toronto follows for most of it way the Queen Elizabeth Way, the road signs have crowns of them with the road number included, but the Queen Elizabeth Way crown simply has QEW inside. The route skirts around Lake Ontario and all my geography lessons from the 70s started to comeback to me. Quite why we studied the Great Lakes back then I have no idea, but it was one of the topics from my third year in secondary school (apologies for younger readers I can't translate old currently schooling to the new 'years' everyone talks about, you will have to do that yourself!). The road gave views of the Lake and one or two great bridges, but travelling at this speed it was not easy to get photos.

We left Niagara at 11.43 and arrived in Toronto at 1.26 - the route was 86 miles. Thankfully the QEW going in to Toronto has a HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane which runs much more quickly than the other three lanes of traffic. In this definition of high occupancy, two people equals high occupancy. The main purpose of this provision is to encourage car sharing, but as we are two people we made great use of this faster the fast lane.

We went into downtown Toronto and managed to find parking in an underground car-park at the Toronto Dominion Centre. Coming above ground we walked our way into the First Canadian Place building and out into the fresh air on a sunny 82 degree day. 

We strolled along Kings Street West past some huge buildings in this, the financial, section of the City. We also came past some older buildings, the brownstone facades off setting the steel and glass of the newer buildings.

We came across St. James' Episcopal Cathedral, this was built in a style of many Scottish Episcopal Churches, quite austere from the outside, but with many stain glass windows inside - as you will see over on Flickr. From here we walked up to Old Town, I hadn't realised that Toronto had originally been York, after Freddie, the Duke of York, during the reign of George III. Some of the old town signs show evidence of the former name, even though the name change was in 1834. York, then the capital of Upper Canada, which later became Ontario, was captured and burnt to the ground by the Americans in the US/UK war of 1812, this led to the British burning Washington DC in retaliation the following year.

We found a nice coffee shop - Second Cup - where we each had a large Americano, I had a cheese and chive scone and Drew a croissant with ham and cheese.

We walked through the streets some more, it is interesting than only 500 miles north of New York and 80 miles from the border Toronto can feel so different from any US city. The pace of life, the nature of the City layout all feels very different indeed. A nice juxtaposition to the US experience. As I described it when I first visited Victoria, British Columbia, halfway between an American and a British culture. 

We began to return to the Car Park via Adelaide Street which runs parallel to Kings Street which we had walked up. Again a large number of buildings of various types new and old were around us. We found First Canadian Place and felt very proud of our sense of direction, but once we were in the Mall the sense completely left us. Given that Toronto drops to average minimum temperatures of 8 Celsius (17.8 F) in the winter, it is obvious why so much of the town links at below ground level to other parts, so that no one needs to go out. This meant we had to walk back and for a few times before finding a map of the building we were in and a path back to the other building. Once we had found the Canada Dominion Building it was an easy step to go down two further flights and get the car.

Toronto to London 

The route from Toronto to London (I couldn't resist booking to stay here when I realised we were passing on our route. Is only 119 miles, an hour and 50 minutes according to Google Maps. But what that doesn't take into account is that Toronto is the fourth largest City on the Continent and, including its suburban and extra-urban sprawl has a larger population than London - all of whom seemed to be wanting to go home on the Ontario 401 as we left the City. So it was 3 hours 15 before we arrived at the hotel. Much of the journey being at 3 miles per hour!! 

We arrived at the hotel at 7 pm, a long but very enjoyable day. After checking in we walked across the hotel carpark to the very well placed Tony Romas. This chain of US Rib houses has been familiar to my family and I since we eat in our first one in Monterrey in the 90s. It is one of those family stories than my sister, looking for a light meal while I was having a rack of ribs asked for a Chicken Salad and had a bowl larger than the top half of her body - this was not ordinary salad but a super-salad. Luckily there was no repeat of this tonight.

Drew started with a house salad, a reasonably sized one, and I opted for the Onion Loaf, this was indeed huge, but as one of my colleagues had noticed the lack of vegetables/salad on most of the holiday posts so far I thought it was time for some veg - though deep-frying it probably didn't quite meet the light eating suggestion :-)

For mains Drew opted for the Mojo Chicken and I for the 'Bountiful' Beef Ribs with hot sauce and a jacket potato. Drew's chicken was soft and juicy and my ribs were fall odd the bone tasty. I'd recommend a Tony Roma's if you like this kind of food.

I remembered not to ask for the check at the end of the meal. I'd managed to use the phrase in the US on each occasion so far, which is quite impressive. Of course this being Canada we have a bill not a check - so I was even more impressed that I remembered to translate myself back into English English before asking for it!!

At 10.15 we left Tony Roma's and were in bed by 10.40.