CANADA: TORONTO TEMPLE, SKYLINE, AND KENSINGTON

September 29-20, 2018

One of the things I like to do as we travel is visit LDS Temples. Currently there are 168 around the world, with 24 under construction and 39 announced that haven't begun construction yet. That is a lot of temples, and I'm not likely to see them all, but it is fun to see one when I can.

The Toronto Ontario Temple was completed and dedicated in 1990.

Like every LDS Temple I have ever visited, the grounds are exquisite.

CANADA: ONTARIO'S BRUCE PENINSULA NATIONAL PARK

 September 29, 2018

On our second day in Ontario we drove along the Bruce Peninsula. Toronto, our starting point (marked with a red oval below), is on the shores of Lake Ontario. The Bruce Peninsula (the red pin on the map) pokes out into the Canadian portion of Lake Huron, almost dividing that lake into two parts.

At the far northern end of the peninsula lies Bruce Peninsula National Park, shown on the map from Wikipedia below. Covering 60 square miles, it forms the core of UNESCO's Niagara Escarpment World Biosphere Reserve. (That's a totally new UNESCO category for me.)

But first, we had a drive of about 290 miles to get there, and like just about every road trip we've ever taken, there was a lot to see along the way.

This was a definite first for us. We've never seen a turtle crossing sign before.

CANADA: TORONTO, THE TRINITY COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD

September 28, 2018

(NOTE: The only advantage of not being able to travel because of the COVID pandemic is that it gives me some space to go back and catch up on recording some of our previous travels that I had not been able to get to. This is one such trip.)

In September 2018 Bob had a Friday business meeting in Toronto, Canada. I wanted to go along, so we decided to add an extra day, then fly home on Sunday. We took a red-eye flight from LAX to Toronto, arriving at 6:46 am. We had time to check into our hotel and shower before heading to Bob's meeting, which was held at Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto.

While Bob was in his meeting, I had a couple of hours to wander around. I started by going off the campus to see what was nearby. 

1. The Church of the Redeemer is an Anglican Church that was built in 1879. Sadly, the church administration had to sell of some of its land in the 1980s, and a massive Four Seasons Hotel was built on the property. However, the money from the sale allowed the church to remain solvent and to complete necessary renovations.

It doesn't have a particularly spectacular interior, but it does have some really beautiful stained glass windows. They were gifts to the church during the early 20th century.

The central window behind the altar depicts Christ on the Road to Emmaus.

These are the windows on either side of the above window. They show scenes from the life of Christ and parables: Christ and the children, Christ in the house of Mary and Martha, and the Good Samaritan.

NEW BRUNSWICK: HOPEWELL ROCK STATE PARK

Thanks to Bob's excellent planning, we hit the next spot on our New Brunswick journey at exactly the right time: low tide.

As usual, just about every step of the way was filled with fairytale forest:

I was especially entranced by the trunks of the birch trees lining the pathway. They looked like pieces of installation art:

NEW BRUNSWICK: FUNDY TRAIL PARKWAY

On the morning of August 9, after getting a good night's sleep to make up for the previous night, we headed out into a rather gloomy day. We were hoping it would be the perfect weather for some moose, but this is as close to a REAL moose as we got:

We were just about to enter this covered bridge, when all of the sudden Bob threw on the brakes:

He's a sucker for restaurants that advertise "The World's Best (fill in the blank)" or "Award Winning (Anything)," even though he also frequently pokes fun at those monikers. The Seaside Restaurant was advertising its "Award Winning Chowder." While our son rolled his eyes, Bob went inside . . .

. . . and returned with some thin, decidedly average seafood chowder . . .

. . . and a boring lobster roll with a side of not bad poutine:

At least our view while we all sampled the morning "snacks" was incredible:

NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA: St JOHN AND IRVING NATURE PARK

I have no idea where I took this photo, but it shows up between our whale watching trip (see last post) and the next pictures, and I love murals, so here it is, just because.

After our whale watching trip, we headed east along the Bay of Fundy towards Saint John:

We stopped at Reversing Falls, a spot where the water changes direction because of the rise of the tide in the Bay of Fundy.

However, we would have had to pay a fee just to access the viewpoint where we could see the water, and we didn't have hours to wait for the shift in the tide. We had other plans for the rest of the day.

CANADA: WHALE WATCHING IN NEW BRUNSWICK

In August 2018 Bob and I and my siblings and their spouses went on a cruise together from Boston to Quebec. My dear husband can never let an opportunity for additional travel go by, and I was longing for some time with our youngest son who lives in New York City, so we planned a four-day pre-trip rendezvous in Maine and New Brunswick.

Our plan was to meet at JFK airport, have a brief layover, and fly to Bangor, Maine, together. However, upon approach to JFK, Bob and I hit a terrible thunder storm with some of the most dramatic lightning I've ever seen from a plane window. We had to circle around the outside of the epicenter of the storm for an hour, and then when we finally landed, so did everyone else, making an unloading bay hard to come by. Two hours late, we finally met our son in the airport . . .

Goofy boys

. . . but of course our connecting flight to Maine was THREE hours late because of the storm. By the time we finally got to our hotel in Bangor, it was 4:00 AM, and the hotel had closed out our prepaid room at 3:00 AM because we hadn't shown up. It took another 45 minutes of haggling to get that resolved, and at 5:00 AM we collapsed, exhausted, into our beds.

Of course that meant our planned departure time of 8:30 AM didn't happen. Instead, we got on the road at 10:00 AM and headed for the Canadian border and then our whale-watching tour in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, scheduled for 1:30 PM. It was a 2.5 hour drive, so we thought we were fine.

A lovely drive with beautiful scenery

Yeah, right.

Did you know there is an Atlantic Time Zone that's an hour ahead of the Eastern Time Zone? We didn't. 10:00 was really 11:00, and now we were pushing hard to get there. Whenever we've crossed the Canadian border in the past, it's been a friendly wave through. Of course, that didn't happen this time when we were in such a hurry. Nope, we were sent to a "special inspection" area at the side of the road, where we waited and waited and WAITED until finally someone gave us the go-ahead.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA: CAPILANO SUSPENSION BRIDGE PARK

Our next stop was the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park.  We knew we were in trouble when the nearest parking spot was about half a mile away from the entrance. We were there on a very busy day.

The Capilano bridge is 460 feet long and 230 feet above the river. The original bridge, built in 1889, was made of hemp ropes and cedar planks. Version 2.0 was built in 1902 and was a wire cable bridge. Version 3.0 is the current bridge, completely rebuilt in 1956. In 2004, a feature called "Treetops Adventures" was opened--seven footbridges suspended 98 feet above the forest floor between old-growth Douglas firs.

In 1935, local First Nations were invited to place their totem poles in the park

My favorite:

The central feature of the park is, of course, this incredibly long span. As it bounced up and down and swayed back and forth as we traversed the gorge, it reminded me of the seemingly fragile but surprisingly strong thread of a spider's web:

MONTREAL: A WALK IN THE PARK AND SAINT JOSEPH'S ORATORY

After finishing up at Premiere Moisson Bakery (see last post), it was obvious that we needed to work off some calories.  The next place we wanted to see was St. Joseph's Oratory, and we knew it was somewhere on nearby Mount Royal, so we decided to just walk to it.  How far could it be? There was a bit of interesting scenery on the way:

I don't get it.  Any ideas?

Our "little walk" turned out to be a mountain climb.  We found the mountain, which isn't hard to miss since it is the only real piece of elevation in Montreal.  We started up and found out it was just a bit bigger than anticipated.

The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York's Central Park. He must have really liked BIG parks. Unlike Central Park's flat terrain, however, this park just keeps going up.  In some places it was so steep that it required staircases:

However, the view from the top was well worth the hike:

The day had started out cold and drizzly, so we hauled out the rain jackets.  Big mistake.

A couple of hours later and on the opposite side of the mountain from where we started, we finally found St. Joseph's Oratory. Completed in 1967, it is the largest church in Canada and has the third largest dome of its kind in the world behind one in the Ivory Coast and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. See those steps in the middle that are kind of green? They are roped off and reserved for penitents who climb them on their knees. We saw a man doing this while we were there, and he stopped to cross himself on each step:

St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal. There are exactly 100 steps.

Remember how Notre Dame in Montreal reminded me of Notre Dame in Paris? Well, St. Joseph's reminded me of another famous Parisian cathedral: Sacre Coeur:

Sacre Coeur, Paris

I loved the stylized name of St. Joseph on the front:

In fact, I loved that this church was dedicated to Joseph, that oft forgotten part of the nativity:

Yes, once we got to the top of that long staircase, there were even MORE stairs that took us to the small chapel behind the main one. We definitely did our fair share of stairs:

There we found a sweet tribute to Joseph and his many roles, each one a prayer station for those with particular needs:

Sprinkled among the stations were walls of canes and crutches that once belonged to those who were healed through St. Joseph's intercession:

One of about ten such stockpiles

The construction of this building was largely due to one man, Andre Bessette, a Catholic priest who was eventually beatified (1982) and then canonized as a saint just last year.  His heart is in the reliquary (yes, his actual heart), placed there on his request as a protection for the oratory. This isn't a very good picture of the heart, but you can at least see how it is displayed:

We finally made our way into the main structure, which was interesting but not necessarily my favorite cathedral-type building:

However, I did love the bright, modern, downright cheerful stained glass windows:

The sun hit them just right to shine through and create this doppelganger on the wall:

My favorite part of the Oratory, and the reason I would come back for another visit, was the series of bas-reliefs depicting the crucifixion of Christ that were sprinkled about the nave on freestanding walls.  If I had to choose two words to describe the artist's attitude, I would choose "tender" and "quiet."  There was a delicate softness to these sculptures that truly moved me, and I loved that Christ was so often depicted with others, particularly with women, instead of as a solitary sufferer. Judge for yourself:

Worth a visit, don't you think?