Toronto With the Brufs

My parents and sister came into town last weekend and we took the opportunity to travel up to Canada to visit Toronto for the long weekend. Since my parents came on Thursday, my Dad and I took all day Friday installing garage door openers. We finally can close our garage without having to get out of the car! It's fantastic, and thanks go to my Dad for doing the majority of the installing and to my Mom for watching/entertaining Ethan. I would have taken a picture of the garage door openers, but I'm sure it's not as impressive or noteworthy to others as it is to us.

Anyway, after a few flight delays, Natalie got into Rochester at 1:15 am on Saturday and then we picked up the rental car (since we couldn't all fit in one car) and headed out to Canada. We made a stop along the way to Grover's which was featured on an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. It wasn't the most amazing food, but it was worth the side-trip to check it out and to try the cheeseburger soup.



After some traffic right in Toronto, we made it to our hotel to find that our rooms weren't ready yet. They told us it would take a couple hours and gave us a free breakfast the next morning if we were willing to wait. Free you say? I'm in! We walked around downtown a little bit before checking in to our hotel. Later on, we walked around and found a great little Pho restaurant that had opened the week before and we split a few dishes. After a long day of traveling we settled in for the night.


The next day we took a ferry over to Toronto Island and walked around. It was absolutely perfect weather. There were some great views of downtown, a mini amusement park, some public beaches and you could rent bikes to bike around the island. We chose to walk around and head back over to Toronto to hop on a double decker bus tour... which turned out to be a mistake.






The Bus & Boat tour was awful. It took forever for them to pick us up initially, they missed a couple stops since they were behind schedule, we would make some 10 minutes stops and not pick up anybody and the tour guide was lame. We finally got off and went to a pub for lunch where Ethan thought it would be a better idea to stay away from us and play with Buzz Lightyear. After lunch we decided to hop on another bus and after waiting for about an hour we figured the bus wasn't going to come anytime soon and bagged the idea and took the subway back to our car. Moral of the story, if you're ever in Toronto and want a double decker tour, go with Gray Line and NOT Bus & Boat.



That night we went to Greek Town and feasted at Mr. Greek which we had found the last time we were in Toronto. I tell ya, I could eat a gyro every day and it sure did hit the spot that night. After dinner we did our own little tour of downtown since the tour bus thing didn't work out. We had to use a map of course since we weren't too familiar with the city.


The next morning we packed up for home and headed to the Distillery district since it was an area that we loved the last time we went to Toronto. After that we made a trip to Ikea, which is always a must when you go to Canada or anywhere that has an Ikea.


We made it back to Rochester around 7 since we also stopped at Niagara on the Lake and the border crossing took a while. After returning the rental car we went and picked up some grilling items at Wegmans and had our own little Memorial Day BBQ. It was divine.

All in all it was a great weekend and we're happy that my family was able to come out and visit us, even if it was for a short trip.