Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!

(Before I get going with this post, let me say that if you're looking for the slide show post, I had to take it down. I'm hoping to get the photo situation resolved in PEI, when we have a different internet connection.)

On the Friday that we were in Toronto the 3 peas decided to go to the zoo. One of the peas is not a fan of the zoo, so he wasn't very happy, but things improved as the day went on. We left our home base around 10am and caught the GO train all the way to other side of the city (about an hour and a half), and then we found the appropriate bus to take us the rest of the way. It was all fairly easy and uneventful! When we got to the zoo we went to find a map and figure out a plan of attack for the day. We discovered fairly quickly that there is a "zoomobile" that takes you all through the park and you can get on and off it at any of the different "lands". Sounds like a no brainer, so we bought tickets for the day! We decided it was best to take one complete trip around the zoo so we could see which areas we would want to get off at and take a closer look around in. Each area is landscaped as the continent that the animals are from (or country) and then there are all the exhibits and trails in each area that allow you to see the animals a bit closer up. After our complete look around via the zoomobile, it was decided that the first place we wanted to visit was lunch. We remembered there was a restaurant in Africa, so we headed back out on the zoomobile and hopped off beside the giraffes. The restaurant was a Harveys and I was excited by that because we had gift cards that included Harveys (I was still trying to preserve cash). The boys found a table and I was off to order. When I went to pay with my gift card, the lovely lady informed me that they did not accept gift cards and they only accepted cash. This shocked me at first because it was a big Harvey's and not a little kiosk Harvey's. I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do, but then I remembered that I had read on my card that it was accepted at all Harvey's restaurants. I flipped the card over and pointed this out to the lady. She was not impressed. Oh well. I was asked to take a seat while she consulted with someone else in the Harvey's chain of command. A few minutes pass and someone new comes to tell me that if I would like to wait for 20 minutes, they would call the head office and have the total of my meal manually taken off my gift card total. I would love to wait, I say. So, we sit some more and wait some more (we have become a little better at waiting for things since we've been on this trip!) and finally another new person appears with our food, my gift card and a smile!

[a short aside here - something I've noticed as we've travelled further east across our country is that the east is not all it's cracked up to be. It's actually a lot like living in England. I had an impression of Toronto being very advanced when it came to technology, service ,etc - a lot more American is what I was picturing. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Ontario and now Quebec are quite stunted compared to the West. It is the same in their churches as well. I was expecting to see a lot of new stuff in Children's ministry and instead I've discovered that Children's ministry doesn't even seem to exist out here. More on this at a later time... I have a friend who has a theory and I've been doing some thinking about his theory.]

Back to the zoo... after our lunch, we headed out to explore Africa. It was really well done! We saw elephants, lions, giraffes, hippos, and every other kind of big creature before we headed in to the exhibit with the monkeys, gorillas and all the creepy, crawlies of the jungle. We spent about an hour looking around before we boarded the zoomobile to head over to the Canada area. It kind of amused me that the boys wanted to hike all the way in to the Canada area when almost all the animals in there can be seen in our yard. It was about a 20 minute hike down a big hill to see eagles, coyotes, wolves, beavers, racoons, grizzly bears and a moose or two.
I think we spent about 4 hours at the zoo before we headed back to the bus, train and finally home.
Later that night we went to play indoor glo in the dark mini golf. Dylan and I played in front of Brendan, Al and Leslie. It was a great indoor course and the only thing of note that happened was when Brendan got Dylan's club smack in his mouth (you would think that would teach Brendan to stay off the course and out of the way when someone was swinging, but no...).

It was a big sightseeing day the next day as we took in the CN tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame and the Ontario Science Center. Dylan went up the CN tower without a complaint (he hates heights) and even had a good time! Amazingly, he liked lying on the glass floor (face down) to pretend he was skydiving off the top. I, on the other hand, thought the glass floor was freaky and it was a bit disconcerting to stand on a glass floor 147 stories above the ground.
The Hockey Hall of Fame was fun and we took Kraymer's picture with us so he could be part of our day! The boys took all kinds of pictures holding Kray's picture up with them. The coolest part was seeing the Vancouver Giants team picture with the Memorial Cup (we held Kray's picture up and took a picture of him with the team!).
The Ontario Science center started one pea on the road to melt down, but we lagged behind the others and took a bit of a break. He recovered and we were off to see what we could see while time and moods allowed. We have decided that most science centers, "Royal" museums and children's museums are pretty much all the same and we don't need to see another one for quite some time! Moods were questionable as our time wound down and then we were headed to meet more family and have dinner at a Chinese food buffet.
Dinner was an experience, but it all ended well. I have never in my life seen so many people in a restaurant before! We had a very long wait (an hour and a half maybe) and then we were seated and the littlest pea lost it. Off to the parking lot for two peas and the middle pea stayed with everyone else and ate his heart out! The parking lot peas were outside for a few laps around the cars and eventually we were able to make our way back inside. We braved the line up for the food and the little pea bounced right out of his mood when he saw the jello. The food was great and dinner was really fun after that. The two small peas ate more food than I've seen them consume in quite some time and we left at about 9pm. By the time we got home, everyone was tired and it was right in to bed for us all.
The next morning was Mother's Day and my kids gave me a card with $50 in it so they could take me out for dinner (thank you to Grandma for helping). We packed up our stuff, had breakfast and Al and Leslie drove us in to Toronto to catch our train to Ottawa. While we were sitting on the train I realized we were two whole weeks in to our trip! There have been moments where it's felt like we've been on the go for a lifetime, but overall, the time is passing very quickly. We were Ottawa bound and only two days away from our halfway point....
Catch up with us in our next adventure, "Mom, is Canada going to have a civil war?"