Canada Day 3 - CN Tower

Note - The Canada posts are now back in Full Force! There was a bit of a scare earlier this week because our external drive in which our photos are stored (3 years worth) got screwed up. Bert had to run a fix and was able to recover most of the data. I was freaking out because my itunes shit was on there as well! Anyhow, it's (almost) all good now and I can line up my Canada posts and just squeeze 'em out regularly like that Duggar woman with 19 kids. Can someone just tie her tubes and sew up her t-shirt shooter snatch NOW pretty please with a shiny red cherry on top?

After the excitement of the Niagara area the previous day and our foray with Polish cuisine, we planned to hit up a few more Torontian "must see" places.  Our first place to visit was the CN Tower, currently the tallest structure in North America (in the U.S. it's the Sears/Willis Tower). This view is 114 floors up.  It was pricey of course to pay for the privilege of seeing the city from way up high, but my mantra was, "We're on vacation!".It's not like we go here every year. Plus, this was a superlative tower - THE Tallest one in North America, THE Symbol of Canada...(cue "O Canada" sung by Geddy Lee of Rush here...)

Can you believe he is almost 60? Where was the rest of RUSH???

Back to the sights...

Do you see the green domed building in the bottom right of the top left quadrant? That's Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, which we happened to see our first day there. Yeah, we crashed a convocation ceremony! Kidding. The top left is The Annex neighborhood.

View of the Financial District(we could see our hotel):

More of the same plus the Gardiner Expressway (that's what they call 'freeways'):

There is a portion of the floor that is all glass. It didn't seem as "scary" as it looked. In fact, I felt the glass boxes that jutted out of the Sears Tower in Chicago were fearsome than this. With this particular glass floor, there were several divided panes. The view down below wasn't too scenic either (I'm not sure if that would have mattered) - it's the Rogers Centre  (formerly known as the SkyDome), a domed athletic venue with a fully retractable ceiling, home of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team among others.

Speaking of teams, there was this group of teenage boys wearing kilts; maybe there were an athletic team from the UK? Not sure exactly which country they were from, but they were huddled together for a group photo and later, were messing around by jumping on the glass. Their shirts had "Academie of something something" on them...A few of them had some really thick cable knit socks too. Uniform or fashion? That is the question.

Here's a segment of the glass floor; you can see part of the signage which reads "Centre" (Rogers Centre). You can see my Converse!

There's the lads in kilts once again...I kept thinking of Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons! Or Fat Bastard from "Austin Powers 3 - Goldmember"!

Here's me, Bert and TC on the glass floor...

There is also an outside portion of the observatory deck. Of course, it's covered by protective bars...This is the Southern View from the Tower. That's also Lake Ontario there.

There's Bert getting some video...

View of Lake Ontario shores...

Cool factoids (click on to make larger if you want to read it):

Northeastern View:

I liked this shot because I got the Tower's shadow in it...

We spent a couple of hours there enjoying the views and reading all the facts about the structure. We then headed out to our next place on our checklist. And because I like taking pictures of stuff like this, if you look closely, you can see a sculpture of a giant woodpecker on a tree trunk.

Here's CN Tower as seen from its base...

Next up...the Hockey Hall of Fame!