Trip To Toronto

Our first stop as soon as we got to Toronto was the Pacific Mall. It's a huge Chinese mall with lots of cool stuff!

It was really neat inside. On the second floor where all the food was, we found this awesome bridge thing. It was like China concentrated into one mall in this place.

We even saw a Chinese "Target!" There were a lot of stolen names in this mall. For example, we also saw "gaSTOPme" pronounced "Game Stop."

The food court was awesome, though. It was real asian food. We saw cooked animals hanging from poles and a man making noodles the old fashioned way!

This was my lunch of Beef Teriyaki from the Japanese express restaurant. Sooo yummy! Adrianne ate most of my rice. That's my girl!

Adrianne later decided she wanted to run around like she owned the place. She was a mad woman in this mall! Actually, it was kind of sad. Adrianne has a very weak stomach and she gets motion sickness very easily. After all the running she did, she got a little sick. But not too bad, then it was back to wanting to run around. Sigh!

People probably thought it looked strange to see Adrianne running like crazy while Daddy just walked alongside her pushing the stroller. Probably not as weird as seeing her actually pushing the stroller with her teddy bear, Rufus, in it, though. She did that with me while Daddy was looking at 5 for $10 DVDs.

My little window shopper. She really expressed her inner girlie-girl. The shops she grabbed my hand and pulled me into were the clothing stores, shoe stores, and the shampoo store/salon.

 Here she was comparing her shoe size to that of the mannequin. When she decided the shoes definitely wouldn't fit her, she gave the mannequin a hi-five and then continued running through the halls!

The window distracted her for a long time. She saw birds and pointed them out to me.

She seriously wouldn't leave the window! She was people watching mostly.

She loved the window so much, she had to kiss it.

When we finally got too tired to walk anymore, we headed over to the Fairmont Royal York Hotel to check in. We got a pretty nice room! Aside from the lovely views of construction outside our window across the street.

First things first though. "Put my shows on, Mom!"

That didn't last long though, as soon as Daddy distracted her with shiny Canadian money to add to her penny collection.

The lobby of the hotel was really nice too. I love seeing Michael and Adrianne holding hands and walking together!

Even the exit was really pretty there.

We went across the street to Jack Astor's for dinner. Adrianne was amazing, for going to a 7 o'clock dinner with a 25 minute wait for a table! She loved being able to color on the table.

In the morning we walked through the city instead of trying to maneuver the horrible city traffic in order to get some breakfast and early morning sight seeing done.

We ate at Sunset Grill, which was amazing. Fresh squeezed juice and delicious food, served really fast. Michael had this wonderful over easy egg dish with peameal bacon.

I had a gigantic french toast, 3 egg, home fries, sausage and bacon breakfast. Adrianne loved the french toast! I'll have to remember that.

We next decided to head over to the St. Lawrence Marketplace, which was nearby. On the way we saw a bunch of people camped out in the park for protest.

The market was way bigger than I was expecting. It was the most fresh food I had ever seen in one place in my life! There was fresh produce lining the street outside, huge meat and fish places inside, two floors of food! There were also some clothing stands but it was mostly food. Unfortunately, we were too full from breakfast to even want to think about food so we didn't stay long.

It was back to the hotel to pick up our car! I just want to point out that when we arrived yesterday, we decided to opt out of the $42 valet parking deal and park ourselves. The Valet guy gave us directions for where to go to park on our own. We drove around for about forty five minutes, gawking at the madness that is city driving, and completely unable to find the parking area. We returned to the Valet area and saw the same guy. "Yeah....we're just gonna do valet..." He laughed at us and shooed us away to dump off our car.

We got a little lost finding our way, but our next stop was the beautiful Casa Loma! This is a view of the front of the castle as best I could get.

This is the garden in the front yard.

The library was really neat! It was a huge room, each wall lined from top to bottom with books in glass cabinets. Gorgeous.

Adrianne had a lot of room to roam but she did get a little too ambitious at times, trying to go up and down the marble stairs repeatedly, which of course I didn't allow. A tantrum was thrown. She liked exploring though! She found yet another window.

There was a beautiful garden room with marble floors and a gorgeous fountain.

The stained glass roof in this room was stunning!

The tall windows let in a lot of wonderful natural light and were lined with plants.

Here was one of the beautiful bedrooms.

This was a living room, one of a few in the castle.

The royal bathroom was certainly luxurious.

Another of the beautiful bedrooms.

Outside was a lovely patio, it looked like it was set up for entertaining. We did later find out you can indeed have receptions here. In fact, as we were leaving, a wedding party arrived!

From the patio balcony, the view of the garden below with the awesome gazebo was very nice.

The overgrown arbor walkway that led down to the gardens was what I had always dreamed of having in my own yard someday! The only difference is mine would be overgrown with wisteria vines, beautiful purple flowers hanging down from above.

Here is a pretty good view of the garden.

This is the castle from the back yard gardens.

Here is an even fuller view.

And again.

This is Adrianne's French boyfriend who was flirting with her like a mad man. He even gave her a beautiful yellow flower! They were cracking each other up, playing peekaboo on the gazebo.

He disappeared mysteriously into the foliage and Adrianne waved her sweet prince farewell.

She learned from him how to peek through the bars of the gazebo and had fun with this for a very long time. Eventually we had to pull her away and another tantrum was thrown.

Daddy carried her down a winding path to the even lower gardens when she eventually calmed down.

I found these along the way. I want those door knockers!

From down below, the castle still towered over the trees, hiding us from the world.

I found many beautiful specimens in the garden.

This pond was really neat, though it probably looks a bit better in summer than mid-fall.

Down some more winding, rustic pathways.

One last shot of the looming tower, and we were off! Adrianne was about 2 hours past due for her nap.

Oh! Just kidding! Traffic decided we were going to sit on the same road for over two hours. The jam was at such a standstill that people were actually getting out of their cars to get things from their trunks. I sneaked a picture of these guys who seemed to actually be rearranging the entire contents of their car during the jam.

When we did finally reach the expressway we were trying to get on, the ramp was blocked off. ROAD CLOSED?!?! Can they do that?! Well, whether or not they could, they did. So it was another hour of traffic jam for us as we struggled to find another way onto the expressway... Poor Adrianne woke up from her nap during the traffic jam. She was a silent angel in the car, the whole time! I could not believe it! I was so proud of her. I let stay up late and do whatever she wanted once we got home.

The source of many of our frustrations.

Saw this weird statue coming our of a building while we were waiting, though.

3 PM til 6 PM sitting in a traffic jam. Here was the time when we finally got onto the empty expressway! Longest traffic jam of my life! We headed straight home, abandoning our plans for a dinner at Niagara On the Lake. It was gonna be a pizza night for us! Delivery, please.

All in all, it was a wonderful mini-vacation. It shattered any desires we had for living in the city, but it was still a nice break. We had a lot of fun and had a great adventure!