Road Trip--Day Eight, Animals, animals, animals

Today we ...
--Visited Toronto zoo-- heard interesting keeper talks about Amur tigers and Komodo dragons.
--Went through customs--reentered the states at Buffalo after being stuck for an hour in Canadian traffic.
--Got a head start on our trip home by driving to Olean, NY to spend the night--had a great a great steak dinner in this small town and enjoyed their squirrel art.

Take a look of some of the sights we saw today.

Butterfly

Pygmy hippos

Sneaks thought this sign didn't apply to him.

Ronald McSquirrel in Olean park.

Gorilla

Amur tiger

Santy Squirrel

Jellyfish

Sneaks should not have been teasing the Komodo dragon.

Road Trip--Day Seven, Downtown Toronto

Thank goodness, today was about 10 degrees F cooler than yesterday. I never thought that 90 degrees would feel good, but we functioned pretty well in it.

Ward and Wally got up early and took a hike in a local park. Theo and I stayed back and did some necessary laundry.

 

This part of the ROM is made of 5 interlocking structures.

Then we set off for Toronto. Traffic was still busy, so we explored neighborhood streets trying to find our way out of the stop and go traffic on the main highways. Our destination was the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), the largest museum of science and cultures in Canada. We only had time to explore a small portion of the museum, but we learned a few things:


--The Canadian flag with the maple leaf wasn't adopted until 1965.
--99 % of the species in the world are smaller than a bee.
--Summer camp groups are noisy.
--There are more red foxes in North America than there are dogs.
--Sneaks enjoyed the museum.

Sneaks swore that these quartz crystals were a hands-on exhibit.

After the museum, we explored more of downtown Toronto including the financial district, water front, and tourist areas. On first inspection, the city seems vibrant and diverse. In the tourist area, we visited the CN tower, a 1815' communications tower with elevators and observation decks. Until last year, this was the tallest tower in the world. On clear day, you can see Niagara Falls. It was not a clear day.

CN  Tower

Food Waste Friday, 7-22-11, Vacation

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. 

Niagara Falls

Here it goes for this week.


We have been on vacation for a week now in the Niagara Falls and Toronto area. We have been doing pretty well with our food waste by utilizing our cooler. Instead of listing our waste (because we're not keeping track of it), I have a few observations.





--Tim Hortons--Why is it that everyone in my family has heard of this Canadian chain but me? They are like a Dunkin Donuts and located on every street corner. We have enjoyed their wares several times ourselves and like their breakfast sandwiches.

--Speaking of breakfast, the hotel we are staying in serves baked beans for breakfast. Not a bad idea, just something new to me.

--And speaking of new, we have also discovered poutine, another widespread Canadian dish. It is basically French fries and cheese curds covered in gravy with whatever else you want to throw in. Tasty, but a steady diet of it would be too much for me.

--Also, we visited the birthplace of Buffalo wings at the Anchor Bar and Grill in Buffalo. And yes, they were good!

--Time to get ready for the day's adventures. Hope that it doesn't make it up to 102 degrees F like yesterday. The heat is putting a damper on some of our plans.

Note: See the rest of our vacation fun by reading my daily posts.

Road Trip--Day Six, Hot Castle

Too Hot!!

Today was going to be our first day to explore Toronto. We had a day planned with three different places to visit. However, Mother Nature got in the way with record breaking high temperatures.

Casa Loma

Our first stop was Casa Loma, an early 1900's castle built by Henry Pellatt. The 98 room castle and Pellatt's life were quite interesting, but the few fans that were blowing were not adequate to handle the building 100 degree heat of the day. By the time we finished the tour, we were drenched in sweat and cranky. We decided to cut our losses and head back to our air conditioned hotel in suburbs.


We may or may not make it to our other destinations tomorrow. It should be cooler, but still in the 90's.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Other vacation tidbits:

--We continued our power plant theme with the Casa Loma visit. We learned Pellatt was the first to build a power plant at Niagara Falls, but because of Adam Beck's campaigning for free electricty, Pallett lost his plant to the state with no compensation for his investment. Later, Beck oversaw the building of another plant that bore his name. That was the one we visited a couple of days ago.

--Everything is very expensive in Canada especially food.

--Toronto traffic seems to be always busy. At 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, we were in stop and go rush hour traffic. Our hotel is in the suburbs, so this is something we have to deal with. However, the traffic is generally well behaved--except for the car that cut off the semi truck today on one of the side roads. We were then treated to several blocks of a lot of yelling and a lot of bad language. Toronto is known to be the polite city. I guess that is why we didn't see any guns come out.

--With hotels, you get what you pay for.

--Wally has almost finished reading a 1000 page book, and Theodore is having problems with his feet which is limiting his participation in some things.

--We have discovered the truely Canadian, Tim Hortons coffee and donut shop, and poutine--a dish of French fries, meat, and cheese curds covered with gravy. There are many variations and it is sold everywhere. Ward and the boys especially like it.

--No matter how organized we seem, or how well we pack, it looks like our things have exploded in our car or our room after we spend just a short amount of time in them.


--We love our GPS!


--A lot of people snore in our family.

Road Trip--Day Five, Tropical Paradise

Theodore is the guest blogger.

What happened today:
Breakfast at IHOP (incredibly expensive).
Visited Bird Kingdom (also includes lizards).
Went to an outlet mall (bought some shoes).
Drove to Toronto (was asleep for most of this).
Dinner at Kelsey's (good food within walking distance of the hotel).

Pictures from Bird Kingdom

Sneaks in a barrel

Two tortoises

Hernando the iguana

Star the macaque

Aggressive horn-bill

Early lunch