d i n a n e . n e t 

(Start from the beginning)

Mike had made reservations for a Hippo Tour on Monday afternoon for Tuesday morning, so we had to wake up at a reasonable hour. We were still quite tired, but much more rested since we had, you know, slept. I was also on Claritin, since the too-nice-for-people-like-us hotel had down pillows. Luckily, though, I realized it before any major disasters occurred, and I just stayed on the stuff until after we returned home.

The hippo tour was in-tense. The previous tour got back late, so we were waiting along the road for a while. When the bus pulled up, it was just barely dripping, and was completely full of people who would have had blue hair, had it been fifteen years ago. A coach pulled up behind the Hippo (who’s name was Happy), and the little old ladies and occasional old men got off one bus to get onto another.

Once Happy was clear of them, we were allowed to get on board. We sat down on some squishy benches, and took note of the craziness. This thing was basically a school bus with a prop in the back. It had capacity for at least fifty people, though there were only about twelve in our group. The whole bus was painted purple and the seats inside were an interesting shade of maroon. Happy the Hippo was about ready to take off and our tour guide got on the mic to start telling us about the town.

We learned that Yonge Street is the longest road in the world, Elm Street has all kinds of fancy restaurants, the CN tower was built so that the locals could get better TV reception, and the ferry to the in-city airport is the worlds shortest ferry ride at something like 32 seconds. Apparently the current mayor won the election based on a “we will not build a bridge to the airport” platform.

By far, though, my favorite story was about the city hall. It was designed by a rather famous architect (please don’t count on my memory for anything like details!), but he was outrageously over budget. As punishment, the politicians refused to put his name on the building or acknowledge that he had designed it – they wanted to prevent him from making it into the history books. Unfortunately for the politicians, he was not quite done with the building yet. So as punishment for them, he immortalized their ugly sides as gargoyles along the roof and doorways. He also carved into the stone his name, “architect,” and the year.

After we went through much of downtown, Happy brought us to the edge of Lake Ontario. The tour guide made sure we were all clear on the going in the water thing (apparently the previous group thought they were just going BY the water), and had us all urge Happy the Hippo into the water. By chanting something silly like, “Go, Happy, Go!” A honk of her horn, and splash! into the water we went.

We saw the water park, the old disco, and a brand new windmill. And then we turned around and went back to where we started. Honestly, it was probably the crappiest part of the tour. Can we say, “Gimmick!”?

When we got back to shore, we were quite hungry, so we started perusing the menus on that same street. We found a Tex-Mex restaurant (of all things), and I got the “lunch-sized” quesadilla. Nothing lunch sized about it. Either that, or they think dinner-sized is the size of Texas itself. It was tasty though. And! I almost forgot. They didn’t give us mints with our bill – they gave us lollipops! Sweet! Literally!

At this point, we made the decision to head over to the CN Tower. Let me just express this up front. I am afraid of heights. I am afraid of enclosed spaces. Elevators make me ill. But here we were, going to the tallest building in the world, where I’d have to go up in an elevator which was full of people and has a window so you can see how far the ground is from you.

EEP!

But I promised Mike, so up we went. Before getting to the elevators, however, we had to go through security. They had neat bomb-sniffing archways. Imagine a metal detector, except a bit deeper, and with air jets all around. Each person in turn stands under the arch, and has puffs of air blown at him. Clever technology, I think.

And… up!

And up…

Up…

60 seconds of elevating time. I really hate elevators. But I survived. Once we reached the top, I gingerly stepped up to the windows to look out. It wasn’t a particularly clear day (in fact, the weather people had warned that it was very smoggy that day), but we could still see forever. We discovered where various buildings we had driven past in Happy the Hippo were, and what some of the things our tour guide had skipped were. It was honestly quite neat.

Then we went down a flight of stairs to the glass floor and outdoor deck. Yes, outdoor. Right. Outside up wicked high in a wicked tall building. Great. But I did it. The glass floor, however, was too much for me. The furthest I got was a toe (not weight bearing). Mike walked across the whole thing. There were people laying down on it, taking pictures, and (AUGH!) jumping up and down on it. I never understood why people aren’t more scared of things in general.

Next on the tallest building tour was the sky pod. This was another 33 stories higher, and another 45 seconds in an elevator, to the highest observation deck in the world. At the top, I surpressed my fear long enough to take a picture of a family (that refused to get close together without some serious prodding). And then peaked over the edge to look down. If this were a screen shot, the people would be two pixels tall. The only reason you could spot them, really, was their shadows. This was very, very, very tall. And I was done.

Down, down, down, ground floor…

(Start from the beginning)

We were assured by the lady on the phone from the hotel that it would be easy to find the Airport Express bus, which we thought was the only way to get from the airport to downtown Toronto. We also were quite sure (based on my experience with traveling in London) that our ATM cards would work in Canada – if only possibly on one of the accounts. So many lies in those sentences…

After an emergency pee (who’s going to use the bathroom on a plane the size of a short bus?), we walked up to the first ATM we found, looking for pretty Canadian money. No go. We found another. No go. At this point, Mike finally saw a sign for Airport Express. It led to an empty hallway. Desperation was starting to sink in, and then, as if with a choir of angels, the tourist assistance booth appeared.

Two very friendly people offered us maps, told us how to get to the Airport Express bus, assured us that they take credit, and then asked, “So, why are you taking the bus, anyway? The subway is only $2.50.” We looked at each other, and subway it was! They circled the appropriate stations and pointed us to the exchange window, where they happily took 30 of my American dollars and turned it into 30 Canadian dollars, some change, and a huge fee. This was by far the worst exchange rate of the century, but it got us some cash so we could get on to public transportation.

An express bus took us to the subway station, and we were once again lost. It was not exactly obvious how to get down to the trains, and would we need to pay again? But there was a different ATM machine. Desperate, we tried this one, and it gave forth shiny green twenties, at a much saner exchange rate, and with only an average ATM fee. Newly rich, we followed some other less clueless looking folks down some stairs, and got on the train.

The subway trains in Toronto make the T in Boston look like a decrepit underground crawlway. They’re clean, they look new, and they move fast. We took the subway east into the city, and after a very simple change of lines, we arrived at College Station, we came up some stairs, took note of another friendly-looking ATM machine, and found ourselves in a mall food court.

Huh?

We decided that we actually were hungry, and we would like to have lunch, thank you very much, so we took turns guarding the pile of luggage while the other went off in search of food. As I sat at the table, surrounded by bags, I took note of the surroundings. Business-types eating a quick lunch, solitary people searching the items for sale in the grocery store I just noticed, globs of people hurrying towards the subway entrance, a couple a nearby table eating noodles… Noodles… I like noodles… Ooh! There’s a noodle store! I had noodles for lunch.

Once we left the odd demi-mall, we found ourselves standing lost, yet again. We knew our hotel was only two blocks away – but which two blocks? We headed about a block in one direction, and Mike suddenly felt that was the wrong one, so we turned around. We got to a major intersection in the other direction, and I took the map and realized that Mike was initially right. Back downtown, and there’s the hotel. Thankfully, since that duffle bag was getting out of control.

I chatted with the first of many front-desk people, knowing that we were rather early for our 3-o’clock check in. She did a preliminary check in or some such thing, and handed us a reference number. She then pointed out the head bellman, with whom we could leave our luggage while we traipsed around the city for a while. The luggage tickets joined the reference card and map in my cargo pants’ pocket, and off we went.

Mike had some interest in the market that was supposed to be downtown by the lake, so we took off in that direction. We found instead, a very pleasant park. There was a fountain approximately 20 feet wide, with a wide path around it, and benches surrounded by annual flowers. Behind the benches a short wall went up to the level of the grass, where a few trees and other plants were scattered around, and where people laid out, soaking in the greenery. An adorable little dog was having an argument with a drainage grate, while his buddy just bounced around. I want a puppy.

After a rest, we continued on our trek towards the marketplace. When we finally reached it, it occurred to me that this was Monday, and markets are closed on Mondays. The whole area was dead, with the exception of a couple people taking out trash and sorting through boxes. Well, there went that plan. But we had seen another park next to the cathedral, so we headed back there for another relaxing moment. Well, mostly relaxing – there was some construction going on in the path in this larger green space. But we sat there watching the birds and squirrels for quite some time.

Eventually, we decided to head back to the hotel, since the lady had said that our room would likely be ready by 2:30. We arrived back at just about that time, and I went up to talk to yet another front-desk person. “Nope, not ready, but I’ll call the housekeeping people and make sure it gets bumped up the list.” I figure that’s okay, because check in is technically at 3:00, so we just sat on the sofas in the lobby for a while. At a couple minutes past three, I went back up to the desk. Nope. I asked how long it would be and she said an hour.

An hour?!

I heaved a sigh, and we decided to go back to our friendly neighborhood food court and get a snack. We discovered that this College Park is not a mall, not an office building, not a grocery store, and not an apartment building – but all of the above. It is totally a self-contained city within a city, complete with indoor access to the subway. These people go out of their way to make sure they never have to go outside in the winter.

We while our hour away, and return to the hotel. I talked to the fourth front-desk person of the day, and was able to tell her that she was my favorite, as she handed us our keycards. We collected our luggage (and tried to figure out how much and how to tip the guy) and headed up the red (not green and not blue) elevator to our room. More weary-traveler rest happened, and we got dressed in our Red Sox apparel (so carefully selected from umpteen stores within the week previous). We were headed downtown to the Sky Dome…

My alarm was making all of the weird noises it does every morning, in a vague attempt to wake me up. I looked at it, and it said 3:39. I squinted to make sure I read that right, and hit the button to turn the alarm off. I could have sworn I set it for 3:30… I don’t remember hitting the snooze button…

The clock read 3:42 when I finally rolled out of bed, nearly clunking right back to sleep there on the hard wood floor. I shuffled into the bathroom and took a shower, the whole time muttering to myself, “Don’t fall asleep in the shower; that would suck.”

I woke up Mike and started shoving last minute items into my backpack. I made sure I had my passport. I collected the trash and took that out to the dumpster. I checked again that I had my passport. As we piled the bags by the door, mike handed me the headphones I’d forgotten while I was busy making sure for the fifteenth time that I had my passport.

We brought our bags – one for checking, two carryon bags, one purse, and one small overnight bag for later – out to my car and took off eastward. The drive to the airport was relatively uneventful, and by this point, I was pretty sure I was awake. We successfully found the off-airport parking in Chelsea, and took the shuttle – which seemed to be waiting just for us – into terminal B.

We got our boarding passes, checked one ginormous dufflebag, and went over the ridiculous security station. Shoes? Seriously? You want me to take my shoes off? O… k…

Once I managed to get those back onto my stubborn feet, we went down to gate B30, where we’d wait for a shuttle that would take us to the special (as in ed.) terminal where American Eagle flights leave from. We waited in the deceivingly short line for some Dunkin’ Donuts and filled our slowly awakening stomachs with muffins and bagels. The shuttle came shortly afterward, and we were really on our way.

If you’ve never been to gate B30 at Logan, you’re missing out big time. To get to the shuttle, you have to walk out an exit clearly marked “Emergency Exit Only,” and walk down a sketchy stairwell that looks like it belongs in a decrepit public middle school. The shuttle has about 10 seats, but they cram about 40 people and all their carry on bags onto it.

I just remembered one neat thing about riding on the shuttle. From where I was standing, I could see straight out the front of the bus. We had stopped, and I looked out to see if we had reached the terminal, but no, we hadn’t. We were stopped at a traffic intersection, yielding right of way to a 737. That was neat.

Once you get to the Amelia Earhart Memorial Satellite Terminal (or some such thing), you walk out into an area with no obvious markings. We followed the bulk of the people and found ourselves looking at a sign that read B30d-h. We were supposed to be on B30b. There was no obvious sign for B30b, but there was definitely nothing else in front of us except for the one door for five “gates.” So we turned around, and it turns out that the dinky little waiting room we’d walked through was for B30a-c.

We sat down, and were soon joined by the people who had been in line in front of us when we were getting our boarding passes and checking our luggage. They were obviously Red Sox fans, in full regalia – well not FULL regalia, but definitely wearing tons of gear – and we struck up a conversation based on our common ground of identical vacations. I never got their names, but they were very friendly people – approximately my parents’ age.

Our new friends had bought their vacation as a package – airfare, hotel, game tickets, airport express bus tickets, everything all together. I cannot imagine how much more they must have paid for such a luxury. We bought the game tickets on the Blue Jays’ website the day they went on sale, at actual face value. We got our flight and hotel together in a remarkable deal on Hotels.com. And we figured on public transportation for everything. The internet is awesome, by the way.

After a brief trip to the bathroom to wash my face, I went to the ridiculously small news stand / food stand to purchase some chewing gum to go along with my ginger ale that I’d bought earlier from the Double D. See, I’m not exactly good at flying. In addition to my fear of heights and of enclosed spaces, I also had a terrible incident where I got an ear infection at high altitude, then proceeded to fly on two three-hour long flights. The second landing, I screamed the whole way down, and ever since, I’ve had a terrible time getting my ears to pop. The ginger ale makes me burp to get rid of the adgeda from the fears and the gum helps my poor little ears.

Our plane finally was ready for boarding, and we headed out into the cardboard tube jetway. We followed directions and our new friends, and found our seats in row 8 – on the wing. See, American Eagle flies these ridiculously small jets (at least their jets!) that have precisely 37 seats (I counted). The shuttle we took to the satellite terminal was bigger.

Despite all of my fears and adgeda, the flight was quite pleasant and very short. Then the most awesome announcement ever came from our flight attendant – “We will be deplaning [cool word!] via steps, so be careful!”

Steps! NEAT! It’s like I’m some kind of international superstar or leader of the free world! I get to walk on the tarmac!

We got off and found that we were once again in a satellite terminal. We took the Canadian (and therefore much cleaner and brighter) shuttle to the main terminal, and went through the friendliest customs ever. I got a smirk from the customs officer when I said we were there to see baseball games. We collected our luggage from the baggage claim, and were off into the wilds of Toronto…