Toronto

No driving today, I am not even 100 percent sure what direction it is from where I am to where the car is parked in an underground municipal parking facility.  Mind you I can find it, no problem, but after climbing the steps up the pedestrian exit from the parking area I emerged to only blink and and peer back and forth at a completely unfamiliar city scape, completely unfamiliar even though I was only a block and a half from the spot where I drove down the ramp into the garage.

We have plans to go visit the car later on, just to reassure ourselves.

We got kind of a late start but after the grueling travel of the last three days we both felt the need for some restful sleep.  Our accommodations here on  York Street in Old Toronto delivered.  Here is the traditional out our window shot.We are on the 9th floor.

We are less than a block from the train station which is located just across the street from that hotel that you can see out our window.  Our hotel is moderately priced, that one across the street is pricey.

When we arrived at the lobby breakfast nook this morning we discovered that apparently the proximity to the train station and the moderate pricing makes this the preferred hotel of the young modern travelling Euro set.  Young people with accents coming and going all  morning, often in sets of 2 or 4, all accompanied by rolling suitcases.  I thought we identified Dutch or possibly German and a 4-some almost absolutely Norwegian.  Another interesting bit is that the downstairs hotel and restaurant staff is Japanese-Canadian and the housekeeping staff is very clearly Russian, including two nice ladies who have provided us with some assistance while speaking only a word or two more English than my Russian.  The card left in our room by our main housekeeper identifies her as Ekaterina.

So it feels pretty foreign.Which is sort of the whole point of going to a foreign country.

Today I continued a personal trend in recent foreign travel experiences.  I brought along my raincoat thinking I might need it in an emergency only to discover that I absolutely needed a jacket to venture out.  It was good to have my raincoat, yet again.

The main purpose of the trip to Toronto is to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame.  We are hockey fans, don't you know.

The Hall is housed in part of a beautiful former bank building dating to 1885.

The building has been incorporated into Brookfield Place which means you don't use that door that looks like the front door as an entrance.  You go around through Brookfield Place, a mall.

Here is another old former bank building which has been incorporated into the interior of Brookfield Place.  This one was a tiny bit trickier, they had to deconstruct that facade stone by stone and reconstruct about 100 feet south of the actual original location.

We got past all of that and down into the lower level food court which in addition to a McDonalds and a Tim Horton's features the actual entrance into the HHOF.

They don't make it as completely obvious as I would have expected but it doesn't take a big search to locate the Cup.

My first time in the presence of the Cup.  For Gopher fans I note that I made it into the presence of the Stanley Cup before ever making it into the presence of Floyd of Rosedale or the Little Brown Jug (not to mention that Ax deal which Minnesota is, like, NEVER ever going to win from Wisconsin).

FT with the Cup.

Gzmoohoo with the Cup.

Many will know that the currently awarded Stanley Cup trophy includes at its top what is actually a replica of the original cup presented by Lord Stanley.  I am guessing that the use of a replica may be related to the fact that they wish to prevent the spectacle of an indigenous person coming into the display area and pounding the whole thing flat.  As happened to America's Cup during I think the second? time New Zealand was in possession of that trophy.

Not to worry, though, just across the room from the current trophy is a vault which preserves historical integrity for the museum by being the repository of the actual original Cup, the actual one presented by Lord Stanley.

So we spent some time looking around at the other historical displays.

Here is the area devoted to my personally most admired former player, Mr. Gordon Howe.

The FT kept looking around for and finally located the display for her personally most admired former player, Mr. Robert Orr.

We were looking around the rest of the museum.  They have an interactive area where you can take shots with a plastic puck at a video screen featuring an actual NHL goaler.  I watched several young Canadian men attempt this and it was way harder to score on the video goaler than it is to describe the action.

We swung by the international hockey portion of the museum and there was some mention of the 1980 US Olympic team but perhaps not too surprisingly Canadians are not quite as captivated by the story as we are.  They do have the whistle that Herb Brooks used when he was running practices.

We also found a picture of Mark Johnson, one of the absolute heroes of that team and a person we see with some regularity when the team he coaches comes to town to play the Women Gophers.  In case you don't know, we don't need no stinking Badgers.

There was also a couple of pictures of Karyn Bye, a local semi-celebrity who we still see from time to time at Gopher games.  She was a member of the 1998 Nagoya Olympics USA gold medal team.

And then we found this:

The Kessel on the back of the jersey refers to Amanda Kessel, Gopher superstar and hockey heroine, former winner of the Patty Kazmaier Award and the top player in women's collegiate hockey for the 2012-2013 season.

Toronto has lots of nice old stone buildings.  This one is the City Hall.  I tried to include an image of the surface public transportation because I know there are potential readers who are interested in that sort of thing.

I still want to get a picture of Union Station, a great old column fronted train depot and of the adjacent Dominion Center.  We walked by them today at a time when the fog was so thick you could barely see for a block, a condition making decent photography unlikely.

We had an afternoon sit down as has become traditional and then set out on what looked to be an about 2km walk to a restaurant recommended by the guide book.  Along the way we passed some public art.  We looked around for a sign or some sort of explanation but found none.

As nearly as we can tell that is a representation of a herd of jackelope.

We continued along Wellington Street looking for the dining spot.  The guide book said on Niagara Street.  This next bit is for a person who used to be our guide when we were in Paris.  The hotel staff had given the FT a map printed for the hotel, showing the location of the hotel and several nearby attractions and upon which the hotel staff had made some x's and circles and such.  The FT informed me that we had to travel down Wellington for a long time and then we would have to make a jog back over towards the lake in order to hook up with Niagara Street.  I myself was navigating with a Borch map that I purchased at Barnes and Nobles.  It isn't quite up to the Lonely Planet map I have of Paris but it is a good map and a considerable step above the Galeries Lafayette map the FT was using to attempt to dictate a route.

I maintained that we could just continue along Wellington for a block or two after the Galeries Lafayette map margin and we would be fine.

The moral of this story?  Good maps make good navigation.  We continued on straight ahead at the GL map margin and eventually arrived as Borch predicted at Niagara Street.

On the way home we came upon this, only about a block and a half from our hotel.

It was a good day, a long day, but a really fun day.  We both find it highly entertaining to be foreigners and Toronto has absolutely come through in allowing us to have that experience.