Highway from Hell; SOARing! in Toronto

Saturday was a baaadddddd day. We left our campground at 1100 for the 45 minute trip to downtown Toronto, where Suzanne had a book signing at the city's largest bookstore, Indigo. Three hours and 20 minutes later, we arrived at the bookstore. The first issue was the closure of Toronto's main highway from the west, requiring 4 lanes of high speed traffic to exit on 1 lane into city streets 8 miles from town. Then they had a festival/parade which blocked all the side streets where many locals (and us furriners) were trying to get around the jams. Then we found that the address sent to us in the bookstore's email was actually headquarters, not the bookstore where the signing was being held. To make matters worse, our Canadian cell phone's sim card had been disabled since last year when we were here. We also had more than our fair share of idiot drivers cutting us off, and cars parked in the curbside lane. Suzanne ran into Best Buy to use their Internet and phone, and at one point when we were "All stop", she actually jumped out of the car and handed a note to a passerby, asking her to please call this number and read this message. The drive gave her the opportunity to practice all of her chakra-clearing exercises, but they were somewhere between red and black for awhile. I knew it was bad when she slammed the car door once and a few minutes later the Canadian Met Office announced a 5.9 earthquake in our vicinity...

Suzanne's guides had told her when we left that she wasn't going to make it in time, but she passed that off initially as bad info; WRONG! At least Frances and Lee Ann, our Canadian Angels, were holding the fort at the bookstore and were as cool as cucumbers. Lee Ann greeted Suzanne with my bride's favorite phrase in situations like this, "Isn't that interesting?" The staff at Indigo was also superb, and it turned out to be a great event.

Meanwhile, though, after dropping Suzanne off, I tried to find a parking place. There was none within 1 mile of the bookstore, located on Toronto's equivalent of 5th Avenue in NYC. I had failed to think about the kayaks on the roof, since there was plenty of underground parking but hardly any above ground. Bummer.... after almost two hours of driving around the block(s), the book signing ended and we headed back to The Bus, ready for massive amounts of therapeutic Chardonnay. Un-fortunately, traffic going back was as bad as coming into town, and we got to make the scenic tour of Chinatown, Little Portugal, Little Italy, and Little Haiti. It was a painful lesson in big-city driving.

Sunday morning's reveille was at 0530 so we would have plenty of time to get to the SOAR! venue, also in downtown Toronto. We arrived plenty early, so had a chance for breakfast at Tim Horton's, a Canadian coffee & donut chain owned by a hockey star. We had a perfect parking place today, just outside La Maquette, whose owner, Angie, came in early to make sure everything was on track and also to attend the workshop. 

The workshop is going on as I speak, and everything is going swimmingly. Here's the coffee and nibbly table, fully stocked...

Suzanne with Frances and Lee Ann, and the SOAR! Workshop is about to get underway. 

I walked down the street to Starbucks for Internet; there was some interesting architecture and a trolley along the way that caught my eye... 

It's a short blog today, because I have to run back and feed the parking meter; $3.00/hour... OUCH!