Toronto - Day 1

We arrived in Toronto just after 9am.  By the time that we had retrieved our bags and caught a taxi to our hotel, it was 10am.  We were once again pleasantly surprised to be allowed to check-in at that early time so that was great being able to dump all of our bags. 

Dundas square by our hotel

The weather in Toronto has been trying to make up for all of the beautiful weather we’ve had to date.  It has been cold, overcast, and trying to rain most of the time.  Our hotel is on Dundas square in Toronto which is right in the centre of the city.  So when we ventured out to explore Toronto, we stumbled on their hop-on, hop-off bus tour.  For a very reasonable price, we can use it every day that we are here.  I’m sure that will prove useful.  At that stage it was only threatening to rain and so we sat upstairs on the open top bus where the view is the best.  For safety reasons, this meant that the tour guide girl doing the commentary also had to sit up the top.  She had a hard night and clearly hadn’t looked out the window before she got dressed and came to work and if she had, she would have worn warmer clothes.  I lent her my gloves and she let us sit up there on our own for some of the trip around Toronto.

We rode on the bus for a while, getting off at in the Old Town District at the St Lawrence market.  This was quite a cool market with all sorts of goodies available for purchase.  Because it was Saturday, they also had a Farmers’ Market there too.  We wandered for ages, stopping to get a Bacon Buttie each for lunch.  It was jolly good bacon, but they didn’t put any T sauce or whole grained mustard on it.  So good attempt, but they have some work to do to make it perfect.

After that, we wandered further into Old Town to the historic distillery district.  Not sure how we ended up there.  Coincidentally there happened to be some breweries there, and we went into the Mill St Brewpub.  I had a couple of beers there and they were OK.  Having been trapped on the train for a few days, we decided that rather than try and find the hop-on bus again, we would walk back to our hotel.  It was a good walk in very cold conditions, but very refreshing too.  On the way back we found an enormous shopping mall where we got some wrapping paper to wrap up all of Jared’s birthday presents.  We then headed back to the room set on getting a good night’s sleep given that we had a comfy bed in a quiet hotel room, as compared with the bunks on the train from previous nights.

Sculpture in Old Town

Tasting notes:

Mill St Brewpub – Tankhouse Ale – Quite nice, deep red in colour.  Was quite hoppy but still very smooth.

Mill St Brewpub – Coffee Porter – Not the best exponent of the style.  I was promised chocolately coffee goodness but it was quite thin and not so tasty.  Part of the problem was that the beer and the outside temperature was freezing cold.  As the beer warmed up, the flavours started to come out, but I finished it before it might have become really tasty.