Toronto

It took about two hours to drive from Niagara Falls to Toronto along quite a busy highway. The driver, who had me sit up the front with him, told me he refuses to drive a bus along the highway in winter because it is so easy to have an accident under those slippery conditions.

Quite a long way out from the CBD (or ‘Downtown’), we could see many fairly new blocks of high rise apartments. The driver said that it is less expensive to rent an apartment there and commute into the city. This of course is true for all cities. The CBD itself is along Lake Ontario, and as we drove in, on our right we could see masses of teams of people, each with their own large tent and other bits and pieces, down on the lawns by the lake. There was was a real carnival-like atmosphere and there were market stalls as well to add to the general sense of excitement and fun. “What’s going on?“ I asked. The driver said it was a huge dragon-boat race to raise money for a charity, and the teams were coming from far and wide. That would have been good fun to watch! 

Right in the heart of the city there were many very tall buildings of a variety of shapes, mostly covered in glass, that were established or in the process of being built. But there was no sense of overcrowding - the buildings were separated, there were green spaces between them and the roads were wide enough to accommodate cars and trams. And it was pretty quiet - no tooting horns and traffic jams like in New York. 

The driver deposited me opposite the station, which unfortunately was under renovation, making it difficult for me to get food and drink. As I am sure I have mentioned before when I had a grizzle about the train trip that followed, all I could get was a muffin and a hot soy latte. However, there was a very good waiting room for the passengers who were in the prestige class or sleeper class, with WiFi facilities, which helped me pass the long hours waiting for the train.

Interestingly, when we stopped at a station about halfway through the trip, where there was a crew change and the train was serviced, one of the men there started chatting to me when I finished a hurried session on my laptop. (WiFi had not been available on the train as it was travelling in remote areas.) He told me that the renovations had been going on in Toronto Station for two years, which he thought was excessive, even though it is a big job and it will look very nice when completed. But it must have been difficult for the shop-owners in the station to have their shops removed and hence lose their business for over two years. 

In the next post I will show you some of the varying scenes I saw along my train ride to Jasper. 

The first photos below show parts of the city near the lake. The last two photos show the station (on the right of the first of these) and the building opposite.