The last and only time I was in Toronto was in 1984 when I attended an international Orthopsychiatry conference. At 4 am on the opening day of the conference there was a kitchen fire in the hotel so all guests were evacuated. The conference attendees greeted each other outside on the lawn in their pajamas. A great start to a usually very formal professional meeting. Now, I have returned to spend a week at Victoria College with Classical Pursuits to study Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.
The drive from Maryland to Toronto was supposed to be beautiful so I spent 9 hours on the road. My only complaint in following the scenic Route 15 is that there were few gas and food stops. Following an exit to a Subway, I arrived to discover the Subway was out of business. I asked a passerby if he knew of any other place to eat lunch and he pointed down a street and said a mile down the road was Mom's Diner. Turns out lunch at Mom's was a highlight of the drive:
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An authentic diner in Savona, NY. Most customers were eating "dinner," being that it was 1 pm. I ordered the veggie omelette, which was delicious. The pie looked really good, too. Each slice was the size of my head. But, I refrained. I had a reservation for the night at a motel in Niagara Falls on the US side, which was a mistake. My room was clean but nothing else about the town was. An odd assortment of people were staying at the motel and when I went out in the morning to put my suitcase in the car I saw someone had removed the emblem off the hood.
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Niagara Falls from the Canadian side is lovely. Upon arriving in Toronto, I was treated to a colorful parade:
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After checking into the Park Hyatt, I searched out Victoria College, which is to be my home for the next week. The College, a 10 minute walk from the Park Hyatt, is one of many colleges on the sprawling urban campus that is the University of Toronto. Now, here is an ivy covered college campus