Day 19 - Quincy Market, Old State House, Boston Common, Cheers Restaurant

This morning we get up at our leisure. Dinner plans tonight is at Cheers restaurant in town so we decide on the best way to arrange plans. Tim is on holidays so has some free time, Vanessa has exams in a few days so I'm trying best not to interrupt study!!

We decide to all head into town together to have lunch at Quincy Market which has a dazzling array of food selections.

A local specialty we try is Clam Chowder.

Vanessa parts ways to a nearby place to sit down and study for the afternoon while Tim and I browse the market and explore, poor Ness!

We visit the Old State House which housed seat of government here in Massachusetts during British rule before the revolution and independence.

We walk past a rather funky looking garbage bin and Tim comments that this is an invention that came from a Babson MBA grad, the bin has an inbuilt compactor which reduces the size of the rubbish so it can fit roughly 5 times as much in before needing to be emptied saving on the cost of people driving around. It is powered only by the solar panel on the top and sends a notification when it is getting full and needing to be emptied.

We go for a stroll around town.

As the afternoon rolls on we walk down to Boston Common which is the main large open space in town and where we are meeting up with Vanessa to head off to dinner.

We all head over to the Cheers restaurant made famous by the television series of the same name to have dinner.

Day 18 - Ice Hockey Hall of Fame, Boston, BBQ

This morning I pack my things and head into town with Warren as I'm taking an afternoon flight and it will take too long to go back out to home and into the airport. We take a risk that there is somewhere at Union Station or the first stop I can drop my bags for a while but alas we are mistaken (Amtrak did in Philadelphia!) so I'm wheeling my suitcase around town.

Our morning is spent at the Ice Hockey Hall of Fame which to be perfectly honest I know nothing about.

They had two very interesting exhibits. The first one wasn't strongly aligned with Ice Hockey but very interesting none the less, a complete collection of the Olympic medals 1896-2008. It was really interesting to see what the host cities chose over the years, most being fairly traditional solid metal, but some were a bit out there with glass etc. Warren and I both agreed that if I won an Olympic medal, we want solid metal!

The second and truly awesome part was the Stanley Cup. Now I imagined it would be behind some bullet proof glass case with some guard dogs and a moat with sharks with lazers for good measure. But low and behold it's sitting in the open and with the watchful eye of a staff member you can take photos with it and touch it!

With some more browsing of the museum and some lunch thrown in that pretty much covers the time I've got until needing to head to the airport and I part ways with Warren and Toronto.

I make my way over to the city airport where Porter flies from and settle into their nice lounge and use up the free wi-fi. Porter is a great airline, I want to own shares in it. It's fairly low cost just like a JetStar but they are going for a business feel to it. There is a nice lounge at the Toronto airport where they are based with free coffee/soft drinks and biscuits etc and good seating which makes it feel classy but wouldn't cost much. The planes are all small propeller based but when its only an hour flight anyway, who cares. The seating configuration is 2x2. On both legs I had two seats to myself to spread out (hmm, maybe it isn't a good investment if they arn't yet filling the seats!). They serve a very basic snack on the plane which makes it feel better than having to pay to eat on a Jetstar.

Anyway, back to holidays.

I arrive at Logan Airport in Boston and as luck would have it came in just behind a couple of european flights and the line at Immigration is disgusting. One hour later I've snaked my way to the front of the queue. The only positive was the captive audience of the hot chick in the line behind me but by mid conversation I discover she's engaged anyway, doh!

After clearing customs with the wave of a hand (if only Immigration was like that!) I get the shuttle bus to the train station and head out to Tim and Vanessa's place on campus at Babson College on the outskirts of Boston.

It's now late evening when I arrive and we head out the back for a BBQ dinner with Enrique and catch up.

Day 17 - Niagara Falls Day Tour, CN Tower

With Niagara Falls being about a 1 and a half to 2 hour drive from Toronto depending on traffic today is an early start. I leave Warren and the rest of the house to sleep in and head down to the subway at about 7:40am. After reaching downtown with a bit of time to spare I head to the nearest coffee shop and grab some breakfast.

At 8:30am a car arrives outside Union Station and shuttles me over to the point where the tour bus leaves from. The driver notices I'm from Australia and we start up a conversation as I find out he used to live in Perth. The two to my left in the car are from Quebec and I get the first close up of the French Canadian accent.

We change to the bus and start on the journey, 2 hours and a toilet stop later we arrive at Niagara Falls and I realise it's actually a much bigger town than I expected. I assumed it was going to be more like a national park, I assumed wrong. It was a rather large town with a number of attractions other than the falls.

Niagara is right on the boarder. One side of the river is Canada, the other is the United States. I think Canada had the better view!

There are two boat cruises running, one from either side so you do don't have to cross the boarder. We take the Canadian boat and head into the falls. They provide everyone with poncho's and as we get closer I now understand why, the spray would be enough for me to have a shower in.

After the boat ride we had two hours to look around town which was a good opportunity to walk up to the falls and take some photos and grab a bite to eat.

We then headed off to a nearby town called 'Niagara on the lake' for a look around, we only had about 45 mins and I think I could have spent half a day there. It was your typical country town main street like you would see in Australia and some of the shops were really good, alas I bought a few things walked around and quickly made the bus in time for it to leave.

The next and final stop was at a winery in the Niagara area for some tasting. We tried three wines, one of which Dan Akroyd had lent his name to.

Once back in town with the tour over I walk over to the CN Tower to visit the observation deck and get a birds eye view of Toronto.

The tower was originally designed as a communications/broadcast tower for the Ottowa area and it was only late in the design that they considered adding a viewing deck and restaurant. It makes sense they did, its currently the tallest tower in the world and a pretty popular tourist attraction.

I arrive just on nightfall so get a great view of the sunsetting across the city.

The ballgame is again on tonight at Rogers and with the CN Tower right next to the stadium you get a pretty good view down to the game. The players look like ants running between bases.

They also have a glass floor section where you can look straight down, not for the faint hearted.

I then meet up with Warren and his housemate for dinner and the day long day comes to a close.

Day 16 - Random Breakfast, Chinatown, Kensington Market, Downtown and Baseball

We wake up fashionably late for a relaxing morning and head down to the local cafe which has some pretty good coffee. On arriving back home Warren's next door neighbour Alex is also arriving and we meet. He invites us in for a home cooked Canadian breakfast and it doesn't take much convincing to accept!

After the delicious breakfast we head down to Chinatown to look around and checkout Baldwin Village. With Warren as my own personal walking tour guide I'm getting a ground up view of the city!

We trek down to Kensington Market which is a street market with a rather eclectic and multi-cultural mix of things to look at and buy. I'm picking up on quite a bit of a counter-culture vibe.

After sitting down at a cafe in the Market, we then head downtown to look around.

We stop at a square between old and new City Halls and spot a row of street vendors. Lunch menu today is a local tradition called Poutine which is Chips/French Fries with cheese and gravy. Comfort food of all comfort foods, could be considered 'a heart attack on a plate'...

It was delicious of course, all bad foods are. Why isn't it that vegetables can't taste like chocolate? I digress. Anyway, after doing some talent scouting and general relaxing taking in the bustling city atmosphere around us we walk over to Rogers Stadium where we are going to see the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team get smashed by the top of the ladder New York Yankees.

We arrive at the stadium a little early and walk across the road to an old railway yard which has been converted into a brewery and furniture shop.

Knowing our luck, just as we are about to walk across back to the baseball one of the biggest storms I've seen in a while comes sweeping through and it pours down. It doesn't look to be easing anytime soon so we make a mad 100m dash through what feels like a torrent of water.

Arriving in the (thankfully) enclosed stadium it's even more of a spectacle than I expected with video screens and entertainment.

The game gets started and Warren and I both quickly compare it to Cricket. Not quite as long but it has the slow factor, it's only so often that a batsman gets onto base from a hit as you seem to be fairly easily struck out, caught or walked. There is though a seriously large amount of foul hits outside the diamond and any balls that go into the crowd they can keep so I'm thinking the suppliers of the baseballs will be a very rich man as it wouldn't surprise me if they went through like 50 in a game. I booked pretty good seats on the infield second deck which meant we had a great view but unfortunately it was a slim chance of getting a foul ball hit our way.

Rogers Stadium has a retractable roof and not long into the game after the storm passed they opened the roof to which I watched in amazement. It's retractable and slides back to the outfield side where I thought it would finish, but the opposite end then proceeded to slide itself around the stadium and fit in between the roof pieces on the outfield end. I'm calling engineering marvel. What was left was 3/4 of the field open air for a stadium that 'has a roof'.

Closed:

Cover slid back:

The entire roof piece on the left then proceeds to swivel around to the other end.

Finished:

And the other end is now completely open air.

Then to make things even better, the Blue Jays beat the New York Yankees, 6-3 and the crowd went nuts.