Episode CXI: Escaping Thanksgiving in Canada

This Thanksgiving I rekindled a personal tradition and used the break from school as an excuse to go on a road-trip. This time I brought my lovely wife along with me, and we set our sights on a foreign country (where, as it turns out, they had no idea Thanksgiving was going on [but they did know all about Black Friday.])

En route to Canada, we stopped at a number of places in upstate and western New York, including Saratoga National Park, location of the Battles of Saratoga during the American Revolutionary War, and a major turning point in the history of the country.

Despite the historical import of the battlefield, Meg's favorite part of the experience was the fact that there were literally hundreds of deer grazing on park land, and my favorite part was that I got to imitate Benedict Arnold (still an 'American' at this point) turncoating.

We next stopped at nearby Saratoga Springs, which (among other things) has real life actual spring water spouting out of the ground throughout the city. Here we stumbled across a spring featuring high levels of natural carbonation (no kidding!) Coincidentally, we had just purchased some pizza, for which naturally carbonated spring water was the perfect accompaniment.

Another stop on the way was Buffalo, New York, where we toured the grounds of a lovely Frank Lloyd Wright house...

And ate at the birthplace of the Buffalo Wing!

 

Finally: Toronto, Canada. Here are  Meg and I sitting on a canoe with the CN tower and other buildings in the distance.

A few salient features of Toronto: (1) Its skyscrapers stretch east-to-west along Lake Ontario, as well as a substantial distance to the north, giving it the feeling of a sprawling city. (2) It is full of Canadians (walking, driving, biking- it is a crowded downtown.) (3)  There is a remarkable degree of ethnic diversity (it is the self-proclaimed 'most multicultural city in the world') which means all sorts of fun food (e.g. Chinese, Jamaican, Italian, Jewish, French, etc.)

['Mother's Dumplings']

 [Quintessential Thanksgiving meal- A 'Reuben sandwich' in the form of a French crepe (delicious)]

 [Peameal = 'Canadian Bacon']

 We did a whole lot of the touristy things that one can do in Toronto. This included two world-class museums (the AGO art gallery and ROM history/cultural/science museum) as well as some tall tower:

Here we are standing on a glass floor, over 1,000 feet above the ground. Pretty cool.

We went to a unique (read: over-the-top) mansion built for financier Sir Henry Pellat, who, among other things, helped bring electricity to Toronto by developing hydroelectric stations at Niagara Falls. Due to some bad investments and government takeovers of his businesses, he went broke before the house was truly completed. Today it is a tourist attraction and a set for numerous movies (for instance, it appears as Dr. Xavier's 'School for Gifted Youngsters' in X-Men.)

This year we 'celebrate' the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, and it turns out Canada loves its War of 1812 (they consider themselves to have won said war.) We visited Fort York, the first real European settlement of Toronto, and a famous battle site from the war in which Americans invaded and conquered the British stationed therein. Many of the original buildings survive (two seen in the photo below) though the fort itself is now engulfed by Toronto, bounded by a 10-lane superhighway to the south, the skyscrapers of downtown to the east, and a dilapidated pit to the north.

[I certainly didn't learn about the U.S. invading Toronto in my history classes...]

One of the more unique things you're liable to experience as a tourist in Toronto is the Bata Shoe Museum, housed in a building that was designed to look like a shoebox. It is a really nicely done museum, tracing the shoe from the dawn of history to the 21st century (turns out, just about every culture in all of human history has worn shoes!) and includes examples from Native Americans, African chieftans, Tibetan monks, Renaissance Europeans (fashionable men wore high heels), The Beatles, Shaquille O'Neal, James Bond, etc. Here I am posing with a pair of socks worn by Napoleon Bonaparte himself (!)

Finally, after a whirlwind tour of the city, we headed back home. On the way back we stopped by Niagara Falls, as well as the college town of Ithaca, New York, set in a particularly lovely area known as the Finger Lakes Region. Here we are on the campus of Cornell University overlooking Cayuga lake, which is around 40 miles long but less than 2 miles wide (thus the name Finger Lakes.) This was the last stop on our Thanksgiving 2012 Road Trip.