Toronto

Let's pass over the fact that it's been so long since I've posted on the blog, and just be happy that I'm finally doing it. Vacations are great but they mess me up.

So we went to Toronto in July. It was a great trip.

The kids loved taking the train

















But not the noise.
We took the train in to downtown and walked around the city checking things out.
We happened to walk in to this nice outdoor art/craft show in a park. I still don't think I know what the name of it was.

What I do know is it was the location of the Great Pants Incident of 2008.

Molly accidentally stepped into that water (which was clearly marked no wading but had tons of people walking around in it anyway).

Well Molly can not have wet clothes on. Can. Not. I honestly think it might be painful for her. There was much screaming, while I tried to come up with a plan. I rolled up the wet part. Didn't matter. I took her to a place with fewer people (which was hard, the place was *crowded*). We had no extra pants, and we were a good 30 minute walk and another 30 minute train ride away from dry pants. I couldn't find any pants that I could buy. I thought about having her switch pants with Caitie, but they wouldn't fit. I thought about putting Sean's extra shorts on her, but that didn't work.

Finally it occurred to me. Cut the stupid things off.

I don't know why it took so long to think of that.



After that we had a lovely day walking around Toronto.

We saw the CN tower, which we decided not to go up in once we realized how much it was going to cost. Apparently it's spectacular, and has a glass floor. But we didn't see it so I'll have to take other people's word for it. There aren't many views that are worth $140.

There was a mad dash to our train, up some stairs, came up on the wrong side, back down, around, up just as the train doors closed. Grrr.

So we waited an hour for the next train, and finally made it back to our camp site.


We stayed at Glen Rouge, which is in Toronto (but only barely). Our site was nice, except for the crazy French Canadians who parked their popup about a foot away from our shared water and the proceeded to set up their kitchen around and in front of the water so we basically couldn't get to it, and who's kids were swinging around 25 foot long poles.

It's not that I have anything against French Canadians in general. They seem to be perfectly pleasant people in general. I only mentioned it in this case because they didn't understand me at all when I said "Could we please get to our water?" or "Could you please stop your son from trying to decapitate mine?" There was a lot of smiling and waving.

Fortunately they only stayed for 2 nights.

Caitie found great trees to climb. She is a monkey at heart.
And there were some ballsy, fat racoons that actually came up and stole a pound of bacon out of our cooler that was sitting about 3 feet away from where I was sitting.

I know racoons can open coolers and will steal your food while you're asleep, but I've never seen one so completely unafraid of us. I chased them and they HISSED at me. OK, OK... you can have the bacon.

*grumble*

On Monday we drove back in to town and Rob dropped Caitie and me off so we could go to Lettuce Knit, which was seriously one of the things about the trip I was most excited about. Lettuce Knit is a knitting landmark.

I'd tried really hard to make it there on Sunday but it was too far to walk at our speed, and we just never managed to be in the right place to catch a street car (which is totally a trolley, but if you call it a trolley in Toronto they will look at you like they have no idea what language you are speaking).

So we made it finally and I learned how hard it is to take a sock picture.

I finally enlisted Caitie to hold the sock for me.

I was so overwhelmed by yarn fumes that I forgot to take a picture inside, but dude, it's tiny.

You see the door that you can see inside? That's as far back as the store goes. It's a really big closet. But there is so much yummy yarn in there. And Megan is really very nice, even when she's hugely pregnant (which I can NOT say about myself...).
There were even words of wisdom in the bathroom from Stephanie herself.

Too cool.
After that Caitie and I took the subway to catch up with the rest of the family. If you ask her she'll tell you the subway was one of her favorite things of the whole vacation. We probably could have saved ourselves a ton of money.

More later.