Day 1

Planes, trains and automobiles

The automobiles

The first day of any vacation I go on is a disaster, and this one was no exception. To be fair, it was only a small disaster, but still enough of a mess to make me wish we hadn't left home in the first place.

The original idea was that we were going to have my friend Charlie drive us to the Merrimack Hilton bright and early Saturday morning, so we could catch the Hudson limo to Logan, get onto an early flight to Toronto, kill off a few hours there, and catch the train at 11:00 PM. Well, 11:30 actually, but they said to show up a half an hour early.

The first part of this plan went easily enough, if not exactly as it would read on the itinerary. We used to go out to dinner with our little group of friends (of which Charlie was one) on Friday nights, and they like this dinner to start a little late. Like about the time restaurants are closing and bartenders are shouting "Last call." Since we were going to be leaving early Saturday morning, we'd requested the dinner to be a little earlier, so they rescheduled the affair back to when the bartenders are shouting "Second to last call." It made a real big difference. That meant we got home from dinner while it was still Friday, but only just barely. Because of this, and because of the other errands I ran before dinner, I probably didn't get everything done that I wanted to.

Things like getting film and traveler's checks.

OK, well maybe if I didn't make that pre-prandial excursion to Waltham to pick up a James Bond movie on laserdisc (one that I wouldn't be able to watch for at least three weeks), I might have had time for those errands after all. At least Robert got some traveler's checks, even if I didn't. It's just that it did sort of subtract a bit from my credibility when I'd promised to pay for the vacation.

So, we found ourselves trying to get up Saturday morning much earlier than we ever get up for work, after having gone to bed too late the night before, and after I hadn't got enough sleep the previous night. That was me losing sleep over the train reservations. That brought us to Saturday morning, early Saturday morning, trying to act more awake than asleep.

Just as a point of reference, if I don't get enough sleep, my body reminds me by getting dizzy and nauseous. What else? Well, my stomach was upset. Not just what it does to me in the morning before work, either. It was laying in for a good day's worth of irritation at the very least.

We couldn't just wait for Chuck to come get us, because we had to make a trip to the Post Office to have our mail held. We were so zealous about getting up on time that we got to the Post Office before they opened, so we got to sit there in the parking lot, twiddling our thumbs (trying not to throw up, actually) until 8:00.

This still got us back home a good hour before Chuck was supposed to pick us up. Robert decided that it was a good time to mow the lawn one last time before we left (in a feeble attempt to cut down on that "rob me" look the house was taking on), and I decided it was a good time to watch an hour of that Bond movie (in a feeble attempt to justify my having pissed off all of Friday as I did).

I didn't quite make it through that whole hour, though, as I was too distracted by all the creaks and groans that our soon to be empty house was making, apparently intent on convincing me that the thieves were moving in, even before we left.

I also had to call Charlie, on his request, to make sure he was awake, and to remind him how long it was going to take him to drive up to our house. Charlie normally makes assumptions such as: It doesn't take any time to get dressed, go out to the car, operate the garage door opener, etc, or that it's at least a five minute trip to cover ten miles of highway and residential roads.

Because of this, he had his normal little chat about how he really ought to readjust the schedule to allow less slack, making me worry that he might be intentionally trying to get us there too late. Of course, that's just how Charlie is, so this wasn't much more stress inducing than anything else. As it turned out, he showed up right on time, which was about the same time that Robert finished the lawn.

Now, I don't expect any of the readers to know this, but Charlie showing up to anything on time is an incredibly bad omen. I should have just started unpacking right then and there.

Because Charlie got to our house on time (a wholly unexpected event), he also got us to the Hudson Bus Line stop about ten minutes early, which Charlie considered to be a mortal sin. To Charlie, getting somewhere a half an hour late is much preferable to getting there one minute early, so it wasn't surprising when I saw the stress lines forming on his face. He was so horrified at getting there early that he decided to just dump us off there in the lot, and let us wait for the appointed time by ourselves.

"I'm not going to wait here for your bus to leave, I'm just going to drop you off and leave now."

"Fine, Charlie."

"You made me get you here too early, and I'm just not going to wait around until it's time for your van to leave."

"OK. You talked us into it."

"We shouldn't have got here early. I told you I should have waited another 15 minutes before I left."

"Fine. See you later."

The bus

Having our permission to leave before our bus arrived did cheer him up, but not as much as the prospect of getting to confuse our bus driver. So, despite his protestations (and my encouragement), he hung around, anyway.

What we had here was the first of many times to come when we ask the question: "Is Canada really a foreign country?". Sure, they are a different country by any legal definition, and a distressing number of the residents do speak French, so I won't be at all hurt when you tell me that my question is:

Patronizing
Old "Manifest Destiny" speak
Ethnocentric
Jingoistic
Just downright disrespectful of Canada's Sovereignty

Still, even if we are two countries, separated by a common culture, there is that business of the world's longest open/free/friendly border, and there are a lot of people on both sides of that border that seem to like to ignore it. So, without wanting to discount the nation as a place that just uses many colored, but slightly less valuable forms of familiar sounding money, and spells a little funny to boot, I think this is a valid question as far as the actual mechanics of being a tourist goes.

"Great, but what does this have to do with confusing an airport shuttle bus driver?" you ask. The answer is very relevant to formulating an answer to the driver's question "Which airline?", which is just a roundabout way of asking "What terminal are you going to?".

I just answered "USscare" but I must have said it too loudly, because Charlie jumped out of his car, and ran over to correct us by explaining to the driver that we really needed to be dropped off at the international terminal.

At this point, the driver looked sort of confused, and watched Charlie and me like a spectator at a tennis match, as we got into a philosophical discussion over whether Canada really does fall into the "international" category with respect to our travel plans.

Or, a half a philosophical discussion. I'd say something like "Well, it is leaving the country, but the customs process is pretty light weight, and I don't know if USscare goes to enough other foreign places to rate a berth at the international terminal...", and Charlie would reply with his impeccable logic:

"Nope. It's outside the US, so it's the international terminal, so there!"

He just didn't seem to have the flair for such deep discussions, so I gave in and waited until he was long gone before I told the driver to take us to the regular USscare domestic terminal, anyway.

Unfortunately, by now the driver seemed to have fallen prey to the subtlety and eloquence of Charlie's arguments, and muttered "well, I don't know. I mean, it is outside the US, so...". I told him that we'd have two hours to kill off once we got to Logan, so if I was wrong, we'd still have plenty of time, and he'd have the satisfaction of knowing that a smart-ass like me would get her comeuppance by having to carry a ton of luggage all over the terminal complexes. He just shot a look to Robert, as if to show pity that Robert would have to be an unwitting victim of my folly.

Just in the interest of minimizing hypertension among our studio audience, I'll skip ahead a bit and settle this now by saying that our flight did indeed leave from the domestic terminal. Actually, I just couldn't wait to say "I told you so".

The van ride itself was, well, kind of exciting for me. Not because anything interesting happened, but because instead of waiting for other passengers, the driver got underway as soon as we got on board the bus, leaving a full ten minutes ahead of the scheduled departure time. If this doesn't sound bad to you, it was excellent fodder for my "first day of vacation" neurosis, and gave me something new to worry about.

What I was worrying about was that we were being kidnapped by a renegade psycho bus driver. I mean after all, he didn't wait for any other passengers, and he just left as soon as he had a couple of unsuspecting victims, with no regard for the schedule or anything. It got even worse when he decided to head for downtown Nashua, taking a route far from any hotels, that could only take us to a place that my hyperactive imagination told me would be where he'd beat us up, take our belongings, and dump our bleeding, rotting corpses into the Merrimack River.

Fortunately, his plans were foiled because most of the roads downtown were blocked off for some foot race. He was pretty quick to cover up his real intentions in light of having been thwarted like this, though. He got onto his radio and called in with some story that he wouldn't be able to pick up the passengers waiting at the "terminal".

You could hear the dismay in the voices of his cohorts coming back over the radio.

Pretty close one for us, huh? Yeah, right. Passenger terminal. Where was that supposed to be? Hudson or something?

Later, I told Robert of my fears, and he told me I was being silly. He made the excellent point that the drivers are all bonded, and that if this one had robbed and killed us, we'd have received a full refund from the bus line company.

The rest of the ride down was only exciting because while we were stopping at every hotel between Nashua and Logan, I'm sure), I had to go to the bathroom, and I was also getting one good reason why Robert should have showered after mowing the lawn.

Oh boy! Three days on the train coming up, with no showers. This was starting to look like it was going to be a very long, albeit fragrant, three days.

The airport

When we got to Logan, I set the pattern for the rest of my day's activities, acting like a newly potty trained tot, having to inspect every restroom everywhere we went. Not many of them rated more than one star, either.

No problems at the ticketing counter: We just stood in the stupid line, kicking our baggage into the heels of the people in front of us at regular intervals. The only funny part was having to fill out some stupid forms for getting into Canada.

This is really dumb. If you're driving there, all you have to do is explain why you'd possibly want to leave the US to some surly US border guard (as he adds your name and description to the "welcome home zero tolerance search" list), then get waved through by some French speaking Canadian guard with a Bronx accent. Here, to go by plane, they even acted like they wanted to make this an official border crossing or something.

Yeah, so we dumped our luggage with the ticketing agent, and wandered over to a vendor where we were able to pay captive audience airport prices for a pair of "Dunkin' Donuts", and sat down in hard plastic chairs to:

Eat our "donuts"

Watch some Looney Tunes on the mini-TV I brought along

Wonder aloud if the reason that "doughnuts" became "donuts" was that dough is irrelevant to the making of the modern donut, and that they are therefore prevented by the FDA from calling them "doughnuts" anymore.

Later, we moved on to the gate area where we were to board the plane. It would seem that there was someone else on our flight with similar plans to take the VIA train once in Toronto. He'd located a Canadian resident among the other waiting passengers, and was trying to get her (the Canadian) to describe to him how to get to the Toronto train station (Union Station) from the Toronto airport. Unfortunately for him, this person was one of the (all too) many Canadian citizens who called French their native tongue.

She knew just enough English to be exasperating. Or, perhaps she was just using enough English to be exasperating. She'd just managed to pick the word "train" out of his question, and to her, a subway train was just as good as any other train. So, she explained to him how to get to the nearest subway station from the airport.

He followed this set of directions with a question to the effect that now that he'd got on the subway, how would he get to the train station from there?

She'd just smile and say "Yes, this is a train".

The plane

Whatever. Further stomach flakiness aside, getting onto the plane was no hassle. This surprised me given USscare's history of having risen from the ashes of Alleged Airlines, and my sole experience with the latter involved a four hour delay for a one hour flight, a 737 sized puddle of jet fuel, a turbine that wouldn't turn over, and a foot race through O'Hare airport afterward. As it happened, the flight left Logan and arrived at Toronto on time. Lest one think it was a happy flight, read on:

It was a DC-9. You know: Two seats on one side of the aisle, three on the other. First class was so small that it was only one row of seats on this plane, and they were so close to the bulkhead that I think they got even less legroom than the average coach passenger. Maybe that explained why no one was riding first class that day. USscare's policy also seemed to be to seat parties of two on the three seat side of the aisle, and split parties of three across the aisle.

Next: I was seated next to a woman who had evidently just come from saving a drowning friend from a major spill at the perfume counter at Jordan Marsh. She spent most of the flight applying still more cosmetics. It was lovely. This only prompted my stomach to remind me that it had a full day's activities planned for me.

Last, but enough all by themselves, were the seats. The Douglas Aircraft engineers had outdone themselves on this plane. One less seat per row than anything from Boeing, yet still they were somehow narrower seats, and still leave no room in the aisle to squeeze past the drinks trolley to get to the john. After the ride down on the bus, and before more bus and train rides later on, we safely concluded that the Douglas engineers had succeeded in creating the world's most uncomfortable seats, which may explain why they've been spotted hanging around prisons lately.

I checked my seat for electrodes.

Well, it wasn't just that the seats hurt, which they did anyway, because the airlines were in on it, too. It started with me falling asleep as soon as we'd been cleared for takeoff. I always do that -- fall asleep during takeoff -- and believe me, it's better for everyone involved that I do.

Anyway, I'd "returned my seatback to its full upright, and locked position" (meaning tilted forward about ten degrees), so when I fell asleep, my head just sort of slumped forward. Now, only my head slumped, and not my upper body. This was due, in part to the fact that the baboon in the party of two seated in front of us knew better than to listen to the flight attendants' instructions, and had reclined his seatback to a point that precluded the use of knees by anyone sitting behind him. Had my torso slumped forward as well as my head, I'd have ended up knocking heads with him, and no doubt finding myself seriously deficient on the Mohs scale.

When I awoke, I found my upper back exciting a sufficient percentage of my pain receptors to cause me to scream. There was no point in screaming, though, as the Advil was safely tucked away in the checked baggage (where I'd never get to it soon enough to do me any good), and Robert was already making enough very convincing whimpering noises for the two of us, having apparently made some progress towards re-slipping his disc.

Seeing me opening my mouth, inhaling for a pretty good yelp and working up a passable "death mask" look of agony, one of the flight attendants cut me short by shoving a "snack" into my mouth.

I took it out of my mouth, unwrapped it, and did a quick inventory: A not- too-bad ham and egg salad sandwich (they must have screwed up or something -- it was edible), served on a hotdog bun, an apple replica stolen from a local wax museum, and a small bag of "Cheez Flavored Snacks". On top of that were knife, fork, spoon, and an assortment of 2/3 helping sized packets of all sorts of eclectic condiments whose only common thread were being completely inappropriate for the meal items they accompanied.

The "Cheez" flavored stuff was a particularly intriguing prospect for me. We all know that the term "Cheese Flavor" is an FDA mandated way of saying that real cheese was used, but only in microscopic quantities suitable for getting the word "cheese" placed somewhere on the package, but only after enough qualifiers have been added to indicated that it has little to do with the flavor of the product itself.

We also know that due to other FDA rules, the word "Cheez" was invented to make you think that they used cheese, when in fact they didn't. This allows them to represent petrochemicals as dairy products without getting sued.

What I found so intriguing was the combination of the two into "Cheez Flavored", meaning something flavored with insignificant amounts of something that isn't cheese.

Maybe we're a lot closer to "Soylent Green" than I'd previously suspected.

Obligatory commentary on Toronto

Flying into Toronto gave me a good look at the city from the air for the first time in my life. The last time I was there was when I drove into town from the southwest. Then, the town had sort of struck me as a sort of Canadian version of Denver, albeit quite a bit larger. This time, from the air, I could see that it had quite a different skyline.

The thing that struck me was that where in most towns I've been in, you'll see a single clump or two of high rise buildings (usually in the one or two "downtown" districts), Toronto has many clumps of high rise buildings scattered all over town. Once we got low enough to get a better look at them, though, I noticed that most of the high rise buildings outside of the downtown area were apartment buildings.

Very disturbing looking apartment buildings.

What I saw were clumps of four or five buildings in each group, and within the group, all the buildings were either identical, or very similar in appearance. You know, sort of like the really horrid looking housing you always see in pictures of Communist countries. In context, it reminded me of some of the pictures we've been seeing coming out of Romania.

As for getting down low enough to see them: That was part of the landing, I guess. I also guess it's a good thing that I had something else to pay attention to in lieu of getting worried about the landing, because the pilot seemed to have an inordinately difficult time setting up and maintaining the approach. Mind you, the actual touchdown itself wasn't bad at all. It was just the part before the touchdown, with all that rocking back and forth, and the erratic throttle settings. At one point, the plane did a very healthy skid, which wasn't the sort of thing I was expecting out of an airline flight.

Well, anyway, here we were in Toronto airport. What we found there was different from what I'd expected to find, given that I always pictured Canadians as being terribly boring WASPs, descended from 18th century U.S. draft dodgers. What we found could well be more racial diversity than I've ever seen in the U.S.

And, a distressing number of French speaking people.

After Robert converted some currency, and after I did the inspection tour of the restrooms, Robert went about securing transportation to the train station. We'd done our best to listen to the directions given by that Canadian woman to the guy back at Logan, but since he wasn't very successful getting a coherent set of directions, we didn't get much out of it either. What Robert eventually came up with was a bus ride to a shopping mall, and a subway ride from there to Union Station.

On the bus again

The bus ride was pleasant enough, aside from the interplay between the bus driver and other traffic. Normally in heavy traffic, all a bus driver has to do is assert himself ("I'm bigger than you, and I'm going there whether or not you get out of the way"), and the traffic parts like the Red Sea. Well, maybe it's because Canadians have that universal health care system and therefore aren't so terrified of getting sick (as are us U.S. citizens), but big busses definitely don't seem to intimidate your average Toronto driver.

That part of it was only scary. He'd assert himself (by threatening to drive his bus into the side of some car), and the other cars wouldn't budge an inch.

Excuse me: Budge a centimeter.

What was pretty ass tightening was the bus driver getting even with the other (intractable) drivers by cutting people off so close as to make me wonder whether he was really performing boundary layer airflow experiments.

As for the composition of the traffic: The mix of cars seemed even more like the U.S. than in the U.S. itself. Go figure. My theory was that the dilettantish Yuppie consumerist dictated retentive buying habits just hadn't caught on in Canada yet. Make of that what you will.

We moved from the bus to the Subway, as I said, at a big shopping mall. There's one pastime that has caught on in a big way in Canada: Shopping Malls.

Looking all haggard and toting luggage through a mall subway station, we looked just slightly out of place amid the hordes of gum snapping Toronto teeny- boppers yammering away in their own peculiar dialect of teen-mallspeak ("Omigod, eh?").

We got onto one of the two Toronto subway lines, which was represented on the subway map in a subway map approximation of a "U", with Union Station being at the bottom of the "U", which is where we headed. Having thus reached the low point of the yellow subway line, we emerged into what seemed to be a pattern all over Canada: Big connected underground complexes, tunnels, above ground enclosed walkways, and shopping areas. One could almost get the impression that the national goal is to never have to go outside.

This alone would be reason enough for me to want to move there.

Union Station

One of the passages eventually led to Union Station, which is your pretty traditional looking huge railroad station, with all that stone work and high arched ceilings. We found the ticketing area, which was a lot like what you'd find at an airport ticketing area: We got to run a little zig-zag rat maze leading to a "please wait here for next agent" sign.

We waited, and when one came free, we kicked our bags up to the window, and handed the guy behind it our paperwork. He read through it, typed a bunch on his terminal, scribbled a bunch of numbers on a bunch of scraps of scratch paper (none of his numbers matching anything on our paperwork, even accounting for the currency exchange rates).

Oh yeah, there was this other problem: They hadn't confirmed the bedroom reservation for one leg of our trip until the day before we left, so we still had to pay for the upgrade from "section" to "bedroom" for that leg. We didn't feel like Federal Expressing more credit card slips around by this point.

The other thing was that our travel plans were evidently too complicated for the computer to handle all by itself, which was why the agent had to do so much hand totaling of numbers on scratch paper.

Eventually, he declared that there was a discrepancy, gathered up all his paperwork, and the stuff I'd handed him, and disappeared for about a half an hour, leaving us standing there, wondering what was happening, where the guy went, and if or when he'd get back.

Over the course of this half hour, and despite the fact that there were other ticketing agents at other windows, various people would line up behind us for a few minutes at a time and ask us questions like "Did you know there isn't anyone at this window?" or "Isn't there anyone here?"

After the first fifteen minutes or so, I was merely really worried (as opposed to my normal background panic level), and wondered whether they were just off in some room somewhere, watching us on a closed circuit TV set, waiting for us to crack. Well, darn it, they told us twice that I'd already paid the proper amount, so they could darn well live with it.

By the time the half hour mark rolled around, still with no agent in sight, I was looking for the closed circuit TV camera, so I could shout into it: "Hey, it's really OK. I give up. I'll pay whatever extra money you want if you'll just come back and give us our tickets." Fortunately, before I could find the camera, our agent returned.

"Ha ha. Just kidding."

He told us that they couldn't make the numbers match what we'd already paid, but that they'd stand by the original price, even though it was about $400 lower than what they thought was correct. Then, he said that part of our package included CanRail passes (I'm glad he thought so), and that they required a lot of additional paperwork, whereupon he disappeared for another half hour.

Again, random people came from out of nowhere to line up behind us and ask us why we were standing at an empty window. Eventually, the guy did return with all sorts of blank forms. He spent the next fifteen minutes or so filling out the paper very slowly, and doing some very painful looking hunting and pecking at his computer terminal.

One hour and fifteen minutes to get our tickets, even when we'd already paid for all but $75 of them. Really.

Robert even agreed that it might be a conservative number, that we might have actually been there even longer, but it definitely took more than an hour to get the things. We were understandably a bit worn out after all of this.

We parked our remaining carry on luggage in one of those airport lockers. You know the kind: Put money in it, and it lets you lock it and remove a huge, misshapen key that will fit in no known pocket or purse. We found a whole batch of these in the station, just around the corner from the ticketing windows. All of them said: "$1 -- Loonies only".

"Gee, thanks! I wonder if we qualify?" We stood around, being a little put out, wondering if we were loony enough to qualify. When no one appeared to answer, we tried flapping our arms, and making what we imagined to be properly loony noises. No dice. Eventually, I remembered that since we'd last been to Canada, they'd put a $1 coin in circulation. As a last resort guess, I asked Robert to look at the coin and see if there was a loon on the back. Fortunately, there was. Lucky guess, eh?

It appears that the Canadians, unlike those of us from the U.S., have managed to keep a $1 coin in circulation for longer than 15 minutes, and their economy didn't even collapse or anything. Their $1 coin, which has the queen of England on one side and a bird on the other (it's up to you to decide which is the loon), is almost identical in size to our own well loved Susan B., except that it has flat sides instead of being round as the U.S. coin was sort of. It's also more of a bronze color, so there isn't as much possibility for confusion.

They're very nice. Really.

But, for all the time the ticketing had wasted for us, we still had about five hours to work off before the train was due to leave. One promising time waster was immediately adjacent to the train station:

The CN Tower

Through some of the windows in the station, we could see the "Sky Dome" stadium and the "CN Tower". While the stadium didn't do anything for us, the CN Tower did. The Sky Dome did give us a covered walkway (again, the national obsession to stay inside) pretty much all the way to the CN Tower.

Just in case you're new to all of this, the CN Tower looks an awful lot like the Seattle "Space Needle", except that this one is in the middle of Toronto instead of Seattle, and it's about three times higher. Really. According to the brochure, this is the highest structure there is, and anyone with enough bucks ($12.00 CDN per head) can get an elevator ride to the highest observation platform there is anywhere.

Well, it's not quite that easy. They don't just come right out and tell you up front that it's going to cost you $12.00. First, we had to stand in line for about forty minutes to an hour. This did afford us an opportunity to hear samples of almost every spoken language on Earth, given the ethnic diversity of all the tourists who get the same idea.

The other part of it is that standing in line for an hour, forking over your $12 per head, didn't really get us moving along the Y axis quite as far as we thought. And, it wasn't $12 per head, at first. What they really did was trick us into waiting in line for a half an hour (the line length was difficult to detect, because it kept disappearing around strategic corners), ask us to fork over $10 per head (to sort of hook us in), and have us stand in another line for another ten or fifteen minutes just to get on an elevator to the first (lower) observation deck.

I think they've done some real good market research here. If, for instance, there was a sign out front that said "If you want to get to the top of this, you'll have to wait in line for an hour and fork over $12", they'd probably get a lot fewer customers. What they do instead is put up signs that say "This way if you want to go to the top of the tower". Only after you've stood in line for a half an hour do they get around to mentioning that they're expecting to collect $10 from you.

Of course, by this time, we'd already devoted a good fraction of our day standing in that stupid line with a bunch of anxious kids, and by the time we got to the cash register, we were ready to pay anything to get the damned tickets, by god, even if they'd cost us our house (actually, it would have taken a lot less to talk me out of that house, but that was another story). And only after that did we find out that we had to wait in line still longer.

We finally got into the elevator, with about two dozen more people than the thing was load rated for. We sort of stood there in the stupid thing on the ground floor for what seemed like an eternity while the elevator operator stood there talking on the phone (oh yeah, that's the other thing about Canada: expect most service personnel to be on the phone most of the time), trying to talk her mom out of paging her all the time while she was at work. Maybe the elevators would run a little faster if the phones in them didn't have access to outside phone lines.

The doors closed, the elevator lurched upward as it attempted to cover 1100 feet in under a minute. (Still another thing: Canada is a metric nation, and seems to take it just about as seriously as England does -- not at all. Everything says metric, everyone talks feet and miles.) Then, the elevator operator launched into a monotonic monologue that she'd already given fifteen times in the last fifteen minutes, and the people next to us entertained themselves by puking in our ears, because they were acrophobic, claustrophobic, agoraphobic, and a few other phobics that they just invented for the occasion, and it hadn't occurred to them that this would involve heights, tight spaces, or other people.

Of course, they knew they were going to get sick even before they got into the damned elevator, but they, like us, were on their vacation, and being on vacation means doing all sorts of stupid things to make you throw up, all in the name of rest and relaxation.

Wait a minute: 1100 feet? I thought that super-duper observation deck was supposed to be at almost 1500 feet. What gives here? Well, it turned out that my $10 only got me to the lower observation deck. From there, I could:

Spend a bunch of money on kitsch in the gift shop

Buy expensive drinks in flimsy souvenir gift glasses in the bar (which was closed for some private function)

Look at a display of antique radio microphones

Play video games

Go back to the ground floor and get back in line for the overpriced restaurant, which is on a higher observation deck than what we paid $10 each to get to

Grin and bear it, and look out of the windows on the lower observation deck.

... or, oh yes, pay another $2 to go all the way to the top observation deck. They get you coming and going. Of course I was going to pay a measly $2 to get to the top. After all, I just wasted all that other time and money just to get that far, so the additional $2 was just another drop in the bucket.

Drop. What a bad choice of words.

If #4 above (play video games) sounds stupid, I should point out that playing video games is precisely what all the kids -- all the ones who'd spent so much time nagging their parents to pay $10 to get them up there in the first place -- were doing. From the video games, you couldn't even see outside, yet that's where all the big lines were.

Well, fine. We paid the extra $2/head to get to the top observation deck. This top deck was completely enclosed, but the wall curved towards the inside of the tower, so we got a really swell view, just by looking straight down, right in front of where we were standing.

I'd never considered myself to be afraid of heights before, but when I looked down at "Island Airport", and noticed that I could look DOWN and see all the aircraft flying the pattern, I decided it was a great time to pick up another phobia.

Shoot. I just remembered that I forgot to declare that phobia when I came back to the states. I hope they don't find out.

I spent the rest of my stay up there hugging the walls and turning green and doing all those other fun things that pansies like me do with such a wonderful view. Robert tried to modulate my skin hue to an even darker shade by attempting to point out all the most sickening sights possible.

Bleah!

I got off that tower as soon as I could, and have dim memories of throwing up in someone's ear on the way down in the elevator.

By the way, if you're wondering about the name "CN Tower", and in specific, what the "CN" is supposed to stand for: I don't know. What I do know is that virtually everything in Canada says "CN" on it, or at least it did from where we sat. I guessed it must have been some sort of national password or something.

Back to Union Station

We went back to the station to find some dinner and to get our carry on baggage out of the locker. Even though there were all sorts of inside walkways connecting everything in downtown Toronto, we somehow managed to miss all of them, and ended up going back to the station by way of the outside streets.

You know, if you get someplace by following underground or above ground covered/inside walkways, you have no idea how to find the place from the outside, or at least I don't. We didn't get too lost.

We went to a deli that had two outlets in the train station complex, and there, we each had a hot pastrami sandwich. Actually, they were warm pastrami sandwiches, but that seems to be as hot as pastrami ever gets in Canada, so who's complaining? Afterwards, we followed a long, winding, subterranean set of passages which eventually led to a hotel (maybe on the other side of town, for all we knew) that had a bar, where we had a couple drinkie-poos. Had a couple bowls of pretzel sticks, too.

This got us to within an hour of the 11:00 boarding time for the train. It also got me about as close to the end of my rope as I ever want to get. Between getting up too early after not enough sleep, getting my body all bent out of shape on a DC-9, wearing my feet down to nubs walking through magic Canadian tunnels, and standing in line at the CN Tower, feeling a little queasy at that sandwich, drinks and the two bowls of pretzel sticks, I was feeling pretty cruddy.

I felt even worse after trying to sit for a half an hour in one of those ghastly hard plastic chairs next to the train gate (which still weren't as uncomfortable as a seat on a DC-9). Of course, it wasn't until about 10 minutes before the train boarded that they told us (or anyone else) that since we had sleeper accommodations, we were allowed to wait in the first class lounge, with all the free soft drinks we wanted, and with nice soft leather upholstered chairs to sit in. As a matter of fact, they didn't mention it to us until all the chairs were occupied.

Oh yes, and my stomach was still intent on keeping me occupied, as if I needed something else to worry about.

The train

Finally, they let us board the train. We had a sleeper room, or bedroom, or whatever they call it. By day, it's got a couple of fairly comfortable easy chairs (far too massive to be found on anything but a train), a sink, and a toilet in a closet. By night, they lower a couple of beds, which make access to anything but the beds almost impossible.

Still, stretching out on that bed was almost the most wonderful feeling I'd had all day, perhaps all month. I just laid there for a while, while Robert checked out all the things in the room. He spent a very long time trying to figure out how the beds raised and lowered until I explained to him that the porters did that for us, and that he didn't have to worry about it. That seemed to relieve him a bit.

Next, he went to work on the vertical row of switches next to the sink. For the most part, they just controlled the various lights in the room. They were labeled in an interesting fashion, though. Each of them was a three position switch: The top position was labeled "ON", the middle "OFF", and the bottom something thought provoking like "No, not this one", "Emergency Only!" or "Oh, no! Anything but this one!". Needless to say, we acted gingerly when turning the lights off. Once, Robert accidentally bumped one of the switches to the "danger" position as he was on his way to the toilet, but fortunately, it didn't jettison the room or anything.

After Robert had finished sniffing around the room, I decided it would be a good idea to get undressed before I got too firmly entrenched in the bed. To that end, I decided to kick off my shoes and stand up to stretch out that one last time before bed. I did so, I stood up, gave my arms a real good stretch and...

... Noticed my feet were wet. In fact, the whole floor was wet. I didn't know what it was wet with, and I didn't want to find out that badly. Didn't feel too much like water, though, which was just a bit unsettling.

Fine. I got undressed, anyway, being careful to stay off the floor, and tried to stay awake long enough to watch the train pull out of town. After years of riding subways or other commuter trains, I figured it would be easy enough to notice when the train started moving: Just wait for that characteristic lurch forward.

It never happened. I just happened to look out the window at one moment, and I noticed that we were already moving. Later on, for all the starting and stopping the train did, I was always impressed at how smoothly it could get underway from a dead stop. I was also constantly impressed at how quiet it was.

It was long before the train got out of town that I fell asleep. Before I'd boarded the train, I was sort of concerned about whether I'd be able to sleep on the train, but after a day like I had, I didn't have any trouble at all.

Follow Robert and me to a day of boredom (as if you're not already bored reading this).

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