The first time I visited Toronto, I was an 18-year-old single backpacker with no money but all the time in the world. Needless to say, much of the trip was spent admiring the inside of bars and clubs with hungover afternoons reserved for the city’s more cerebral museums or quirky flea markets.
As soon as we left the car and walked the long gravel track into the forest, the traffic, sidewalks, shops and restaurants of the inner city faded gently to background noise
That trip, I’m afraid, is another story and possibly not one for a family newspaper.
Fast forward a substantial number of years and I land in a rather chilly Toronto to visit my husband’s relatives with my husband and a severely jetlagged toddler in tow.
The bars are out of the question although I need the alcohol considerably more this time round, and if there’s one thing kids hate, it’s shopping. It was time to explore the city with the fresh (or is that bloodshot and bleary) eyes of a parent.
The relatives lived in a tiny apartment on the 14th floor of a tower block with a small baby and an Australian sheepdog. Consequently, we needed to be out and about as much as possible. First stop was the streetcar. Yes, to an under-five, humble public transport can be a source of much wonder.
These trams are not museum pieces, but form the backbone of the downtown transport system. Their novelty value was not lost on our offspring, who pressed his nose to the window and watched the inner city go by as we tried to get our bearings.
The streetcar whisked us to the subway which took us to a bus which eventually dropped us in front of the Ontario Science Centre, by which point the joys of public transport were wearing thin.
Lucky then that the centre was more than worth the effort.
Our son dived straight into an innovative exhibit on physics disguised as a water play area. He was soon pouring liquid over cogs to make them turn, sailing boats with increasingly heavy cargos until they sank, and generally getting happily saturated while presumably firing multiple neurons.
He was equally enthusiastic about the soft play area which made a valiant attempt to offer different sensory experiences in an environment that also allowed children to hurl large foam cubes and spheres at each other with impunity.
With one parent on duty in Kidspark, the other took off to explore the rest of the museum. There are rocks from the moon and Mars, a cloud chamber, a slice of real jungle and a science arcade of the ‘ahhhh! I never knew that’ variety.
Mind Works attempts to unravel what is going on in your cranium as you look at all this stuff while the Challenge Zone tests your ability to respond to problems in outer space as well as the real world. I seemed remarkably inept at the tasks, but blame the jetlag.
The museum is trying to make science fun and accessible for everyone; it got full marks from our family.
Having survived another night of tortured sleep with a wide awake youngster, we braved the zoo. After our son put his finger inadvertently up a pig’s nose in the Kids Zone, we hastened on to Splash Island where he got so thoroughly exhausted that we had to shake him awake to admire the mega-fauna as we toured zoo versions of Australasia, the Americas, the Canadian Domain and the African Savannah.
The Tundra Trek was our last stop; it’s a chance to see polar bears, Arctic wolves and reindeer and there’s some rather sobering information on global warming thrown in there. If you take the bus, you’ll feel virtuous. We’d driven a borrowed gas-guzzling 4x4 and were suitably chastened.
Day three started with breakfast at Chez Cora. There was a queue out of the door and down the street, but it was worth braving it.
The menu left me paralysed with indecision; should I go for the Samira Wake Up, a work of art in fruit form, or an artistic omelette with delectable criss-crossing of cheese on the top and an artful side of strawberries.
And then there were the pancakes... While we decided, coffee arrived and continued to flow with free refills until we were feeling half-human again. We were ready to tackle the natural world in Toronto at the Tommy Thompson Park on the shores of Lake Ontario.
The park had a fairly inauspicious start, beginning as a breakwater and becoming a dumping ground for building rubble, but various action groups have managed to utterly transform it into a fabulous wilderness. Perhaps there’s hope for Mount Magħtab yet if the government deigns to get its act together.
As soon as we left the car and walked the long gravel track into the forest, the traffic, sidewalks, shops and restaurants of the inner city faded gently to background noise.
Our son played on tree stumps and kicked through moss, and when he fell asleep we went in search of a huge colony of black crowned herons, double-crested cormorants and great egrets in the cottonwood forests.
The noise and smell led us straight there. Hundreds of birds were hunched in precarious nests over a swamp land, eyeing us warily.
We walked on through swaying wildflower meadows and into sand dunes. Back on the breakwater, ring-billed gulls and Caspian terns swooped over the lake.
We polished off day four with a trip to the Royal Ontario Museum, essentially a natural history museum. Among six million exhibits it offered some gems: real Egyptian mummies, a bat cave and a towering dinosaur section all of which translated to a rapt child. Bingo.
And finally, blissfully, the in-laws took the kids and I ventured out into Toronto’s shopping districts alone. I started with the quirky mix of shops on Queen Street West for up-and-coming fashion and bizarre gifts my family never knew they needed, such as a hand-painted dust pans and brushes.
Queen Street eventually brought me to the Eaton Centre mall (a tourist attraction in itself which makes The Point look like a corner shop; it has all the usual suspects plus some novel Canadian retailers). From there it was a short walk to Toronto’s most iconic department store, The Bay (a sort of souped-up Debenhams).
If there’s anything more dangerous to domestic financial stability than a mother relieved of her offspring and then released on a foreign capital with a credit card, I am unaware of it.
But as far as I saw it, Toronto had delivered; it felt only right to give something back.