Even at fairly late date, it’s not that hard to get a hotel room in the Leamington / Kingsville area for the August long weekend, and they accept one-night stays.
However… when your hotel says it has free wifi, that doesn’t necessarily mean said wifi will actually work. (Too bad, as otherwise we have no complaints about King’s Hotel, which had nice rooms, was a good deal, and conveniently located.)
M.E. and Suzie’s, a wonderful restaurant in Port Stanley, has closed.
The restaurant now residing at the former M.E. and Suzie’s location has some of the worst food we’ve ever had. The lowlights were the supposedly “lighly breaded” smelts that actually were deep-fried mush and the “pork” dumplings that contained something brownish that didn’t really look or taste like pork.
The highlight of that meal was the wine. (Malivoire “Guilty Man” white.)
Aleksander Winery is fun to visit. They don’t really limit how many wines you can taste. You can opt to have cheese with your wine. (Jean filled up on that after our poor lunch.) The staff is friendly and knowledgeable. And the wines—pretty good! We ended up buying a case of various types. The highlights were:
Chardonnay Barique, an oaked Chardonnay that didn’t taste very oaked. It improved as we tasted it. (And it was the first one, so drunkenness wasn’t a factor in our judgment.)
Charmbourcin, a less-common, light red wine that originated in France, but isn’t much respected there. Very food friendly.
Baco Noir, full-bodied and delicious.
Cabernet Franc, lighter than the Baco, heavier than the Chambourcin, and well-balanced all around.
During this last tough winter, Aleksander Winery lost 90% of its grapes. So don’t look too hard for their 2014 vintage in the future.
Cooper’s Hawk winery is also pretty fun to visit! It was busy when we got there so they took longer to get us set up with wine, but then were quite friendly and knowledgeable and not too strict on tasting numbers. We had been here before, and found they were still really good with their off-dry whites. We left with several types of those: a Gewurtz, a Riesling / Gewurtz blend called Touché, and a Chardonnay Musque. But we also quite liked their Cabernet Franc, and the Pinot Noir Rosé that our server confessed was a really hard sell for them. “People just don’t like it!” It is very dry, which might not be what people expect in a rosé, but I think it’s going to be fabulous with food.
Mettawas Station in Kinsgville is, fortunately, still a good place to have a meal. Very casual, but nice pastas with fresh ingredients, and a decent list of area wines by the glass.
Thunder can be so loud it rattles your hotel room. The #onstorm that hit KW earlier arrived after midnight there, waking us with a start.
Mango Rock Cafe in Kingsville is great place to have breakfast. Very friendly staff and quite decent, creative cooking here, like whole-grain pancakes with glazed walnuts and steamed apples. Yummy coffee also.
Kingsville is kind of far. It’s a good three-hour drive. It’s really too far to go away for a one-nighter. Be a good destination if you can spare two nights, though. Then we would have had time for more than a brief look at Point Pelee National Park.
Our recent trip took us to Dubrovnik, Croatia (after a 9+ hour flight, transfer, and additional 45-minute flight). We then took a one-week, small-ship cruise of the Dalmatian Islands, ending up back in Dubrovnik. From Dubrovnik, we took a short trip to nearby Lokrum Island.
Not our boat’s itinerary, exactly, but does point out the places we visited.
He’d found a small-ship cruise that fit into one of the few periods this spring where we could fit in a 10-day vacation.
And that’s about it, really. Jean did all the booking of this trip: the cruise, the flights (not that easy to arrange), the hotel in Dubrovnik, where we stayed before and after getting on the ship. I bought a couple Croatia travel guides and flipped through them, but overall, this was one of the trips I’d prepped for the least.
Reading the cruise itinerary, we both had similar thoughts: Wow, that sounds really relaxing.
Our annual “weekend in Toronto in winter because Jean has a conference” wasn’t terribly eventful—we drove back before da big storm really hit—but it did provide some photographic opportunities.
We visited the very crowded, kind of expensive, but still pretty neat Ripley’s Aquarium.
The big draw seemed to be sharks swimming overhead.
But there were other interesting critters, too
Hello moray
We had some trouble getting dinner reservations Saturday due to (I assume) Winterlicious being on. But we managed to get in at Frank, at the AGO. Jean had their Winterlicious items while I ordered from the main menu.
This was the mussel appetizer.
I had a roasted squash salad. For mains, we each had a tuna entree, but prepared different ways—both good.
This was the Winterlicious entree.
For wine, we had a bottle of a Spanish white, an albarino, that was on special. Quite nice, and appeared to be low in alcohol.
For dessert, Jean’s had rum raisin crème brulée. Yum.
I had the Tres Leches Cake—not too shaby, either.
For January, the weather wasn’t too bad. It was partly sunny on Saturday, and not that cold, especially when not in the wind. So we did do some walking around, and Jean took some photos.
Toronto City Hall
Skating rink at Nathan Phillips Square
View from our hotel
Sunday we had some delicious dim sum (no photos), then visited the Douglas Coupland exhibit at the ROM. It was more to my taste than Jean’s. Therefore, you must now prepare for a precipitous decline in photo quality, because the following ones are mine.
If you look at the next image through the camera of your cell phone, they’ll look quite different than they do with the naked eye. It’s really weird. (And if you actually take the cell phone picture, you lose the effect.)
I don’t know what you do if you’re looking at this post on your cell phone.
The exhibit was very pop art-like. One set of paintings was of QR codes that bring up phrases like “Sworn to fun, loyal to none” and “I wait and I wait and I wait for God to appear”, that you can then text to your friends to confuse them. Another was a large installation of found objects, arranged to represent the four quadrants of the brain, and the cerebellum.
The following photos might help you judge how interested you might find all this. How many of these coloured squares do you want to read?
This might be a record number of Christmas posts in a row, but it is more than a one-day event for me (albeit not 12 days), starting with our Noël à deux in advanced of December 25. I’ve already mentioned the meal we had, but we also do a small gift exchange. Jean’s main gift from me was a new watch of a brand he admired, but he got some other little things, like a Chromecast and “life-changing” Saxx underwear (as the ads I now encounter everywhere I go on the web remind me).
My main gift was a record player, which many people thought was an interestingly retro choice of gifts. What I didn’t mention too loudly was that this is actually my second record player (we won’t even talk about how many DVD players I have). The main feature the new one has that the other didn’t is a USB connection to make it easy to digitize LPs. (Because some songs are rather difficult to find digital versions of.) But it also has a nice Start function, and is hooked into the better stereo system. I’ve already listened to more LPs in the last 2 days than I have in the last 2 years.
I received other little items, including a great deal of chocolate: Not one, not two, but three boxes of Purdy’s chocolates; a raspberry chocolate bar; and mini snowballs! I also happened to win a Godiva chocolate basket at a Christmas dance. So the chocolate stores are shored up for a while.
Then we headed to Timmins, where it was weirdly mild this year, but not so mild as to melt the snow:
We took advantage of the nice winter weather to go walking and snowshoeing, once on our own, once with toute la gang (almost).
Five of the fourteen of us who went snowshoeing one day
A day after a fresh snow fall, the kids couldn’t resist doing this:
Christmas Eve my side of the family had dinner and stockings at my brother’s house, then the two of us went out to the Réveillon with Jean’s side of the family. As usual, everyone was fasting:
A tiny sampler of the available food
There was a very good turnout, with only a few nieces and nephews away this year. The gift exchange from Jean’s side is an anonymous one on a theme, which this year was royal purple. I am now the proud recipient of two purple travel mugs. My lucky giftee now owns Prince’s Purple Rain on CD and BluRay.
With my family it was the first time in quite a few Christmas’s that all the siblings were up. We had a terrible time. 🙂
Two siblings and an in-law, as I don’t seem to have a photo of all siblings. Perhaps I’ll get one from Dad later.
We also attempted a theme this year, though it was only loosely adhered to: comfort and joy. Cozy scarves were a popular item.
Cashmere!
S-S rockin’ the faux fur
As were books! I have, like, six new books now. Most everyone else got a least one, I think. I made my sister’s fit into the theme with the Pleasure in the title—pretty close to joy, right? (Plus, John Taylor—yummy! Joy!)
To add to my haul and increase the utility of my earlier gift, I dug through the LPs from our teenage years that had been languishing at my parent’s house, and brought home a bag-ful. Duran Duran, Aha, Prefab Sprout, Adam Ant, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, The Housemartins, Paul Young, Squeeze, Echo and the Bunnymen, … I have quite the makings for an Eighties party.
It’s a historic, downtown Toronto performing arts theatre, seating about 3000, beloved by many Canadian artists, such as Gordon Lightfoot and Lowest of the Low. I’ve seen some fine performances there, by Ray Davies, Jon Stewart, and Classic Albums Live performing Queen’s A Night at the Opera.
But I’ve always found it amusing that the cheaper seats—the ones higher and further back from the stage—are literally worse seats: they don’t have any cushions. That is, in the orchestra area, the chairs themselves are actually better, as though improved sightlines were not sufficient motivation for charging more for tickets. One also gains added comfort.
I could find that an amusing quirk, because I’d personally always managed to get seats in the center orchestra area.
Until this weekend.
Though I didn’t dawdle in getting tickets for Classic Albums Live: Who’s Next, I had to wait until after the subscribers and members were done until I could get my own. At that point, only Left and not Centre Orchestra was offered up as Best Available.
Now, left orchestra seats do have cushions. What they lack, however, is width. Seriously. They are super-narrow seats. You might think economy airline seats are bad, but these are worse.
This was a bit of a problem for my broad-shouldered husband, who had to spend the whole show sitting awkwardly askew, yet still spilling over into my seat and feeling he had to apologize to the woman on his other side.
But he was still better off than men in some other rows, where several large guys were seated next to each other. I’m not even sure how they managed.
So if ever wondering why the people in side orchestra seats at Massey Hall are so quick and frequent in providing standing ovations: It’s not they are particularly appreciative of the performance. It’s because they need to stretch!
Now hey, on with the show…
I was very excited that the Classic Albums Live group was tacking Who’s Next, my favorite Who album, even if it required a trip to Toronto. Only 10 songs long, Who’s Next contains no filler. It starts with “Baba O’Riley” (Teenage Wasteland) and contains both the song erroneously considered to be their best, “We Won’t Get Fooled Again”, and the one that actually is, “Behind Blue Eyes”.
Live, “Baba” was a stunning opener (just as it is for The Who), with the insane ending rendered amazingly by a cellist and the Moon-like drummer. This cellist was to demonstrate her musical chops all evening, as she moved between trumpet, keyboards, and vocals. That’s range, folks!
On “Bargain”, I was especially struck by the three guys who came out to do a clapping sequence, because:
a) I’d never noticed the clapping sequence in the original
b) I thought it was cool you could get a job in music just clapping
On point b), however, I was soon disavowed of that notion, as the three guys joined the cellist on horns for “My Wife”.
Clearly, the band size varied based on needs, but were always larger in number than the four members of The Who. Apart from the musicians already mentioned, we had another keyboardist (who just stuck to that instrument, covering all the synthesizer bits), an acoustic guitarist, an electric guitarist, a bass player, another background vocalist, and a lead singer. He was the same person who did The Queen show, and while he doesn’t sound like Freddie Mercury or Roger Daltrey, he has the range and power to do both justice, and that’s what matters—even though he does tend to mess up the lyrics at times.
And, we got one more special guest on “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: A second lead vocalist—the guy who sings at their Led Zeppelin shows—was brought out to make The Scream as epic as it needed to be.
A compilation of Roger Daltrey screams for YGFA
(And that is the sort of special extra thing you get in the Toronto performances of Classic Albums Live that you usually don’t in the touring productions.)
So overall, it was a superlative job by the band. The only problem had nothing to do with them, but with the guy beside me (not Jean), who insisted on singing along—really badly—with a number of the songs. This completely ruined for me what should have been the highlight of the whole show, the lovely vocal harmonies at the beginning of “Behind Blue Eyes”.
Honestly. I now kind of understand why The Who themselves played so loud!
The second half featured a variety of other Who songs—including 5:15, The Real Me, The Seeker, Pinball Wizard, You Better You Bet, Love Reign O’er Me (and thank God, with no overdubbed vocals from my tone-deaf seat-mate) and Who Are You.
And for the true Who geeks in the audience, they also did the extended, 10-minute version of “My Generation” from Live at Leeds, (which segues into various bits of Tommy, etc.), performing it very honestly, with only the same number of musicians as the original: Just four. It was really very cool, the faithful reproduction of something originally completely improvised. I have to wonder how many in the audience knew what that was?
Regardless. We in the side aisles were all happy to give it a standing ovation! 🙂
I clearly enjoy a certain amount of luxury when I travel, so can hardly be called a budget traveler, but I can be an incredible cheapskate about certain things. Like bank charges. And roaming fees.
So here are some ways I found to save on these things. Along with some ways to save your sanity, and maybe do less damage to the planet.
Tip 1: Use a credit card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees
We do tend to use the plastic a lot when traveling, but it only dawned on us recently that we were being charged an extra 2.5% per transaction for the privilege. That’s a lot!
Now, I don’t know if it’s the only credit card that offers this perk, but we’ve been happy with it so far. It charges no annual fee, and you earn 1 point per dollar spent in general, 2 points per dollar spent at Amazon. Once you’ve earned enough points, you automatically get a cash back credit of 1% on your credit card.
As with most points credit cards, the interest rate is terrible, so we must always pay it off in full. But by using that on our Seattle trip, I estimate that we saved a good 2.5% in total! And we earned $20 back in points.
Tip 2: Get some foreign currency before you leave
Haven’t yet found a way to avoid out-of-country ATM fees, so we always try to get some foreign currency before we go. Our supplier of choice is Currency Converters, who charge no fees and carry a wide range of currencies, and can order anything not right in stock.
Tip 3: Use a US SIM card in an unlocked phone
My Canadian cell provider offered one week of US service for $40 with unlimited texting and calling, but capped at 250 MB of data.
Or, I found I could buy a Roam Mobility SIM card and pay $4 a day for unlimited texting calling, and 350 MB of data every day! Sold!
In fact, there are a lot of options for US SIM cards, and I don’t know if this one is the best. I did like that I could buy and set it up in advance, (right from my local gas station), and that it could be activated for the exact amount of time needed, down the hour. And unlike some cards, it included calls to Canada, not just the US.
Setting it up couldn’t have been easier (beyond struggle to not lose the tiny SIM cards), and it worked a treat.I totally loved the novelty of not worrying about using data on my phone! The only times I had service issues were in the mountainous regions, which is understandable.
Your cell phone won’t work here.
At Lake Crescent, I had only “emergency service”, and was a bit stunned when my phone started shouting out Amber Alerts. At regular intervals. I finally had to just turn off the phone.
Then when home, I watched Sleepy Hollow, and Ichabob Crane encountered the same phenomenon! So I guess that’s a thing. (Do they not do that here, or would they if we ever had Amber Alerts, but we never do?)
Tip 4: Take the light rail to and from the airport
The train from Seattle airport to downtown, where our hotel was, was $2.75 each. A cab would have been about $55.
Furthermore, the train runs frequently, and traffic in Seattle is terrible, so I’m not sure you’d save much time in the cab, either.
So go LTR.
Tip 5: Consider flying out of Kitchener Airport
OK, this one is perhaps not a money-saving tip, as I’m sure it’s a lot cheaper to fly out of Buffalo.
But it’s much nicer flying out of a tiny airport, where yours is the only flight they have to deal with at that time. And yes, we had to transfer through Chicago, but honestly, I have never had so much assistance with an airport transfer in my life. All along were staff making sure we got in the right line, used the machines effectively, found the right gate.
It was even easier on the way home, when our luggage transferred through and we didn’t have to do double customs and security.
Parking—right at the airport, of course—was only $55. About half the off-airport cost at Pearson. So there’s that…
Tip 6: Rent a Prius!
Did we really save money? I don’t know. It was only $17 the one time we had to fill up, but the rental was slightly more than with a conventional car.
Did we help save the planet? Dubious, given that we also flew across the country.
But how often do you get to drive a Prius? Though I must say your odds are much better in Washington State, because they’re all over the place there. Must be the Prius capital of the continent.
The rental Prius
(We also, by the way, stopped and looked at Tesla which was being exhibited in Seattle. Very nice! Of course, they didn’t let us drive it. But they did mention that Washing state was also the Tesla capital of the continent. Bit of a granola state, I guess.)
Most notable difference on the Prius vs. a gas guzzler? Lack of zoom zoom. Although there is a Power button you can push if you really do need some acceleration in a hurry. And it is a pretty quiet car. It also has these neat displays showing you when you’re drawing on battery power vs. engine power, so that was some built-in entertainment.
Near Mount Rainier, we stayed at the Copper Creek Inn, which provides an unusual “do it yourself” experience in hospitality. You pay the cost upfront—not unknown in online booking online—but then they send you an access code and directions for getting into your room. That is, you never check in: You get there and let yourself into the building, then into the room. The all-important wifi password is posted on the wall, and any other documentation you might need is also in the room.
No one makes your bed or gives you fresh towels for the second day, either (though apparently, if we had stayed a third day, that would have happened). And when you’re ready to leave—you guessed it—you don’t check out; you just leave.
While we did take some time to stop and eat, meet with friends, read, and relax while in Seattle, this post will focus on the activities we managed to pack in.
The initial weather forecast for Seattle wasn’t that great, but after we got there (in the rain), made it to our hotel, had a snack, and were ready to head to explore, it had become very nice and sunny. Our hotel was right by the famous Space Needle, so we decided to take the opportunity to go up that right away, while the weather was cooperative.
While at, we also bought a City Pass, which gave us access to four other sights along with Needle, saving you about half the cost in entry fees, if you visit them all.
We’re just back from a trip to the Seattle area. In retrospect, we ended up giving ourselves too many travel days: the Saturday to fly there and drive to our Inn near Mount Rainier; the Monday to get from Rainier to our Lodge in Olympic Park; the Wednesday to get back to Seattle and check into our hotel there. (Then of course, Sunday we just flew home. Today is the “day off work to catch up on laundry and get used to Eastern time zone” day.)
Then again—and this was our thinking while booking—we’d never been to the Seattle area before, and who knows when we’ll get back? So might as well pack in the sights while there.
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