Casa Loma

Today we picked out a couple of spots on the hop-on bus tour that we were going to investigate further.  The first of these was Casa Loma.  Just to the north of Toronto, is a big castle overlooking the city.  It is Casa Loma.  It was built by Sir Henry Pellat who seems to have been one of the people who really put Toronto on the map.  His story sounds quite tragic though, as he seems to have made heaps of money doing quite innovative things at the time, and then when WWI started he made a series of bad decisions that kept getting worse and ended up dying penniless.  Anyway, he built a pretty snazzy castle that the City of Toronto has taken over and lets tourists wander around inside it.  On a day that was forecast for rain and snow showers, being inside a warm castle seemed like a good idea.

The castle was awesome and the history on the audio guides was pretty good for the most part.  Sir Henry was a man of vision, and he envisioned a grand castle and so that is what he built.  There is an underground tunnel linking the main house with the stables and the potting shed.  The castle had extensive gardens and glasshouses (which have since been pulled down) and Sir Henry was renowned for his beautiful flowers.  The whole thing was done with a lot of style.

The castle itself was very grand with a massive library and dining hall.  Apparently Sir Henry was a good guy too, as his staff seemed to think highly of him and that they were treated fairly and well-compensated.

One of the highlights was getting to go right to the top of one of the turrets of the castle that looked out over Toronto.  Unfortunately, the rain etc that was forecast materialised, and the view was less spectacular than it might have otherwise been.

We didn’t leave the castle until about 2pm – it had been really interesting.  We grabbed a bite to eat on our way to the ROM – the Royal Ontario Museum.  It is a very architectural building.  In fact it seems to be overflowing with architecture.

Inside, there were a number of interesting exhibits.  The ones about the First Nations (native American Indians, or Inuit) contained a good quantity of stuff to look at, but there was very little telling you what it was all about.  By contrast, there was a lot of stuff telling you what was going on in the Canadian history section, but not as interesting stuff to look at.  I guess that some people are hard to please.  But we’ve seen a few museums on our travels, and I’d have done this one a bit differently.

On the second floor was where all of the animals lived.  They started with the dinosaurs and ranged through to a whole collection of stuffed animals of today.  They even have a Bat Cave, where they tried to show how bats lived in caves.  Hmmm.  I’d have done that differently too.  All of their stuffed animal exhibits were very good though, but by then our feet were getting a bit sore.  We find that we can walk with purpose for quite a distance each day, but the meandering around looking at stuff really kills your feet.  Life is tough when you’re on holiday for a year I guess.