We’ve had a busy couple of days! Yesterday we spent the whole day at Victoria Park. The splash pad was open, so the boys spent lots of time splashing! Felix laughed almost the whole time he was in the water, when he stopped laughing I knew it was time to dry him off. Arthur was off and running as soon as I finished sunscreening him. Last year Arthur cried if I made him sit near the splash pad, and this year he was running in front of the water guns, getting sprayed in the face, and laughing about it!
Grandma and Felix:
The park was full of baby ducks and geese, these looked so tiny they must have just hatched!
And today we went on our first of three Toronto excursions this week. I recently bought some City Pass tickets which gets us into 5 awesome Toronto attractions for almost 50% off! Today we were supposed to go to the Toronto Zoo, but we changed our plans last minute with the forecast of rain. Thank goodness we did too since it poured and thunder stormed all day.
First off was Casa Loma, a castle built in the early 1900’s as a private house. It is so cool! Arthur was super excited, he loves stairs and old suits of armour etc, he really enjoyed going to a “real” castle. Because of the date it was built, the fact that the original owner/builder was a war hero from WWI, and that it’s run by the Kinsmen of Toronto, one of the upper floors is essentially a museum of WWI-WWII stuff. It was so interesting, and definitely a highlight of the visit.
Travis pointed out the rectangle of map that was much dirtier and well used. He figures that this must have been the area of beach that Lt. Auld landed on.
The owner and builder of Casa Loma:
Travis insisted on climbing some rickety stairs up to a tower. There were signs everywhere saying to hold tightly to your small children so the boys and I stayed below while he climbed the tower. When he came back we had to stop because his legs hurt so badly from the climb!
This was the lightswitch/plug in, didn’t look very safe but they were in every room!
This was the master bathroom shower, along with a magazine blueprint of the shower from a magazine
An old newspaper ad for a washing machine to “save mother”
A section of the carved wall panelling, each panel was different:
So once we were done at Casa Loma, we drove down to the Royal Ontario Museum (the ROM) and checked out the exhibits. This was another huge favourite! We’ll have to go back again since we couldn’t see everything in one day, but it was well worth the visit. There was a whole exhibit of minerals and gems that I could spend all day in alone. I won’t post most of those pictures here, but I will be posting many of them over at www.cobbledstone.com in a series of posts about the various gemstones I use in jewelry.
A stuffed albatross, I had no idea they just looked like giant seagulls:
A giant birch bark canoe definitely impressed us all…except for Felix maybe
Travis insisted I take a picture of this, whatever this is:
Some super cool armour, I love that a big fuzzy ‘stache is part of the one on the right
There were tons of stuffed animals at the ROM, most were pretty cool
And then there were the vampire bats, complete with victims. Thank goodness Arthur didn’t really notice.
And the stuffed polar bear complete with baby seal (head)
An uncut Columbian emerald:
This piece of morganite was 1625 carats! When you consider that your average diamond ring is one carat or less, it’s very impressive
It was neat to see a stuffed lynx, native to Northern Ontario (ie: Marathon!)
This totem pole was about three stories tall!
Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops:
No comments:
Post a Comment