Toronto, Ontario

Leaving the natural beauty of the Thousand Islands trail behind, it was time to deal with city life again as we hit Toronto at the far west of Lake Ontario. Toronto is a huge city, Canada's largest, and one of many diverse neighbourhoods and appearances; it's been represented in movies as New York, Chicago, Washington DC and even Moscow. Our half-day excursion centred around the downtown area.  First stop the CN Tower, Toronto's...

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The Great Lakes / Thousand Islands Trail, Ontario

The Great Lakes are a collection of freshwater lakes spanning the north-eastern portion of the US / Canadian border.  Separately, the lakes are Ontario, Erie, Michigan, Huron and Superior.  Containing a fifth of the Earth's fresh water and with a total surface area of around 94,000 square miles, the word "lake" seems like a rare understatement in North American terms.  It's no wonder some people refer to the Lakes area...

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Ottawa, Ontario

Ottawa was our second stopover in Canada and another one I (vaguely) remember from my DJing days.  I remembered it being much less French than Montreal, which suited me as I was getting nowhere fast trying to get hold of a pay-as-you-go SIM card when we were in Montreal.  My French is decent enough but Quebec French is very different:  different accent, different slang, words have different meanings.  For all I know,...

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Going Dark

So we've had virtually no access to the Internet in the last couple of weeks.  Don't worry, I'm fine, no obvious psychological damage so far, it was touch and go there for a while but I pulled through. When we left Boston and Cape Cod, we travelled north to Adirondack Park in upstate New York.  With over 2000 miles of hiking and bike trails and 3000 lakes spread across 2.3 million (!) acres of mountains and forest, it seemed...

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Boston, Massachusetts

By the time we reached Boston, I think the multitude of cities we had visited were all blurring together in our brains.  We were looking forward to getting out in the sticks and winding down for a while, but we weren't sorry that we made one of our last east coast stopovers here while we had the chance. Many people recommend doing the "Freedom Trail" as a tourist in Boston.  It's a 2.5 mile brick-lined route that takes you...

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Lockdown!

No, the FBI haven't finally caught up with me.  This is a post about Eastern State Penitentiary, which we got the chance to check out while we were in the Philadelphia area.  ESP was the first penitentiary and was once the most famous and expensive prison in the world, housing some of the most notorious inmates like Al Capone and the bank robber Willie Sutton. A huge, Gothic, fortress-like structure, it imposed on the landscape...

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