Day 21
Train-Be-Gone
Well, this was it. Our train travels were over for the foreseeable future.
We got dumped in Toronto Union Station at around 9:00 AM, which was only 1.5 hours behind schedule. I can assure you that by this time, the only two things on our minds were shower and sleep. Again, I hadn't got too much sleep the night before, since I was still staying up too late to watch the scenery, and sleeping too lightly because I was worried about oversleeping our arrival.
Of course, just getting off the train and finding a shower and bed right off the bat like that just wasn't possible. First, we had to find our luggage and a rental car, and that was guaranteed to take at least an hour. In reality, I think it was more like an hour and a half.
Saying that Union Station in Toronto had on-premise rental car agencies is a true statement, but it's still pushing it just a bit. What they had were a couple of booths in front of the station building. What they didn't have were luggage carts, which meant that we had to lug our bags (full of at least a million pounds of Len Deighton books) outside, and stumble around looking for the rental place. We were also underfoot of just about every commuter inside the downtown area, having decided to take this trek when all the commuter and subway trains had just come in.
We found a "Tilden" rental car place. It had nice, friendly agents inside, who were involved in tediously long phone conversations with people wanting to rent cars, but who needed it explained to them how they (the prospective renter) should know whether or not they had a driver's license. One of them turned out to have a license, but sounded incensed (well, I couldn't tell, but it was as much as I could gather from the side of the conversation we could hear) at the notion that they'd have to figure out how long they'd held the license. Evidently, this person didn't think it was possible to determine how long they'd had a driver's license, and wasn't going to let the rental car agent off the hook until they'd convinced that agent how impossible the request was. The rental agent tried to get the person to read the date off the license, but it grew obvious that the person on the other end of the phone either couldn't read or didn't really have a license, or both.
We got a car with a working air conditioner, and didn't even have to pay a surcharge. The people at the rental counter though I was sort of funny when I asked them if it was going to have a working AC, but after our experience in Vancouver, I wasn't going to take any chances.
We managed to get onto a highway heading in what we thought was the right direction so quickly and so easily that it almost looked like we knew what we were doing. Almost, that was, until Robert noticed that all the exits were scrolling past in upside down order, because we'd gotten onto the thing heading in the wrong direction after all.
Well, sleep deprivation and overloaded olfactory glands can do that sort of thing to you. Despite our best efforts, we arrived at the hotel around 11:00 AM, anyway. Our biggest problems at this point seemed to be whether or not we would have enough energy to take our showers before our naps.
Fat chance. Check-in time wasn't until 3:00 PM, so we had about four hours kill off. Neither of us could imagine how we'd be able to do it, but we pressed on anyway.
First stop was to find a Cirrus chain money machine. On the way there, we found a Pizza Hut, and decided that just about the most wonderful thing in the world right then (other than another Nanaimo bar, or a nap or a shower) would be a nice, greasy "Thin & Crispy Pepperoni Lover's" at the Pizza Hut. So, after we got our money, we decided to do just that. The only problem was that we'd forgotten all about the regional variations in the Pizza Hut chain. It just didn't have the same menu as we were used to. They didn't have a Pepperoni Lover's Pizza, offering a "BBQ Beef Lover's Pizza" instead (50 cents extra to have them use BBQ sauce instead of pizza sauce (and who wouldn't?)), which sounded pretty horrendous, and the only crust was the Pan Pizza, which at least satisfied the desire for a greasy pizza.
We ordered a double pepperoni pan pizza, which was ok, and it was greasy. It just didn't waste enough time to get us nearer to our showers.
Sigh. Only three more hours to go until a badly needed nap. We saw a Sears as we drove around, so we decided to drop by and buy some more typewriter ribbon cartridges. It would turn out that this little trip to Sears would use up almost all the time we wanted to kill off, which is probably the only way we could waste three hours trying to buy something at Sears, and not be rip-roaring pissed about it afterwards.
First, we stopped by the place that we saw on the way to the hotel first time around, and find that it's only one of those little bitty "catalog" stores. Robert went in and asked where a "real" Sears store could be found, and they directed him to a place on the other side of the town we were in (Scarboro). Lots of confused, and slightly tired driving later, we show up at the place, and find out that it's a great big catalog store, and still not the type that you'd find typewriter ribbons at. One of the counter help directed us to a shopping mall in downtown Toronto.
Fighting a whole bunch more traffic, we made our way downtown, and even got to the store in question, despite all the best efforts of the Toronto roads and bridges department that'd put up all those "road closed" signs.
You know, a lot of the streets in downtown Toronto have trolley tracks in the middle of the only lanes that weren't blocked by parked cars, and I made the rather irritating discovery that the track width of those trolleys are just about the same as the track of a Ford Taurus, which happened to be what I had rented. Thus, I spent blocks trying to fight the steering wheel out of places that I didn't want to go to.
Well, you know what I mean.
This killed off enough time (yes, we did find some ribbons), that another trip back to a supermarket near the hotel (for shampoo) just about got us to check-in time. Just about, but still not quite. In our befuddled, smelly, sleepy states, we could only think of one other thing: Nanaimo bars. Back to the first mall we'd been to (for the Cirrus machine) in search of the elusive Nanaimo bar.
Toronto malls just don't have the same size or flair as those in Western Canada, you know. By now, I was viewing that as a Good Thing, but they still seemed sort of pitiful by comparison. We found a couple of bars, anyway.
I don't know. We were both pretty tired. I must have been on automatic pilot, and Robert must have been asleep, because by the time either of us came to our senses during the drive back to the hotel, we were clean outside of the Toronto metro area, on some highway heading for parts French, and generally getting there a lot faster than either of us could compensate for on a road map.
By the time we were sorted out, with our Nanaimo bars in our bellies, we were in that hotel like flint. Good half an hour wasted just getting lost. Cleanly past checking time, we found the hotel again.
The hotel was the Guild Inn, in Scarboro, Ontario, just east of downtown Toronto proper. It's also the place we'd stayed at four years before during our Canadian Car Adventure. It's a nice old hotel with all sorts of artsy-fartsy stuff in the halls and out in the garden. I think that's because it was built on or near an artist's guild, which is a safe bet given the place's name.
I was excited because signs all around the hotel boasted of their private smokehouse where you could get some smoked fish. Even still, nap and shower were the only things on my mind for the rest of the day.
We got our showers, too, which were almost as wonderful as the nap that followed. We slept for about four hours, waking at 8:00 PM. When we did awake, we both spent about an hour mumbling incoherently, stumbling into walls, and finding clothes that didn't smell too bad so we could go down to the bar to enhance that nice out of body experience we were having.
They had a nice bar there, except that "Special! Every Friday Night! Karaoke in the bar!" Lucky us: It was Friday Night. They had a Laser Karaoke machine set up in the back of the bar, and a bunch of semi-inebriated customers were doing their renditions of "The Top 25 Popular Songs You Can Almost Remember the Lyrics to." This was really sad, because the Laser Karaoke machine not only displayed the lyrics on a TV screen in front of the "singer," but also told them when to sing what. Even still, most of the people converted most of the lyrics into those groaning noises you make in lieu of forgotten words.
Well, other than that, it wasn't too horrible. I mean, many of the people who tried a song managed to get several notes in each song exactly right, or at least come within a diminished fifth of the right ones. Some of them even happened within the correct measures.
I tried to anesthetize myself to the point that it didn't hurt, but I found that goal sadly unreachable. It sort of struck me, though, what kind of medication those people must have been under to get up there and make such fools of themselves.
All the drinking gave me a serious case of the munchies, so we walked up the street to the convenience store. We found 750 ml bottles of Coke in those real Coke bottle shaped heavy glass Coke bottles. We got one of those just for old time's sake. I also got a pretty good meatball sub from the pizza place on the way back.
So much for another day. Nothing really interesting happened, except for getting those ribbons, and you know: I still haven't used them. Washing and sleeping were the only things we were really interested in on this day, and what could I find to say about them that I haven't done already?
On to Day 22 and Sightseeing in Hotel Rooms
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