Toronto Sightseeing and Home

On Wednesday, September 26 we had all day to tour Toronto so we checked out of our hotel and left our bags with the doorman to hold until we returned.

We boarded the nearest "hop on- hop off" tour bus and  rode the complete circuit to get our bearings.

We listened to the on-board narrator who spoke in Canadian English,  but everyone was given ear phones to listen to recordings in any of the nine other languages shown by their flags here.

We thought this dog fountain was rather unusual.  They are after the gold bone at the top.  There are 27 cast iron dogs and one scared cat!

We noticed this truck may have been driving a bit too fast in this upstairs parking lot!  Note the CN Tower on the left.

This street sweeper was one of the reasons that the city of Toronto is so clean.

There were numerous outside cafes like this around the city.

Like good tourists, we hopped off at the CN Tower for a tour.

The Tower is 1815 feet high.  The elevator only takes 48 seconds to get us up to the 360 degree viewing area.

For a few extra dollars a daring person can go up to the next level for special handling to engage in the "Edge Walk.

Here is a picture of what you get. They put you in a harness and let you go out on the ledge for excitement.  You can even lean over.

Bill decided that there was not enough money in the city to get him to do that!  Scaryyyyy!

The views from the CN Tower were excellent.  Here we are looking down at the sky scrappers.

This is looking to the southwest over Lake Ontario.

Wednesday evening we retrieved our bags and got on a "Niagara Airbus" transport limo for a two-hour ride to Buffalo New York.  We were the only ones in the car so the driver took us to Niagara Falls to see it at night from the Canadian side.  He drove us through U.S. customs and dropped us off in Buffalo.

The Buffalo train station was much smaller than what we had been seeing in Chicago, Vancouver, and Toronto.  We boarded the Amtrak "Lake Shore Limited" after midnight for our sleeper birth on a ride back to Chicago where we arrived around noon on Thursday.  Finally, we got on our last train, the "Wolverine", for our final leg to Kalamazoo.

We arrived back in Frederic around 11 PM after retrieving our old bird in Lansing.  We had an excellent vacation by rail.  If you can see the orange line on the map above it is a rough path of the train routes we took.  We traveled almost 7000 miles by rail and got pretty good at sleeping on a moving train.  If you ever need any advice on North American train travel don't hesitate to ask, because we just might have the answer.

It was fun!

🚂