Two years in Toronto

We’ve talked about the food, and we’ve talked about the views, but how about food with a view? My family’s visit gave us the perfect excuse to visit the tourist sites of Toronto, with the city’s most famous landmark, the CN Tower, at the top of the list. And friends (visiting a few days earlier on their honeymoon) had highly recommended the Tower’s 360 Restaurant – not least because you can avoid the entrance fee by booking dinner there. So as the evening rush hour slowly dissipated 351 metres below us, we enjoyed breath-taking views of Toronto’s islands, skyscrapers, parks and thoroughfares all bathed in brilliant sunlight. The food was excellent too, with an all-Canadian menu from Newfoundland cod to Alberta beef, and local wines taken from the world’s highest cellar. This is the way to see the city! A week later, as a belated birthday treat from my parents, we headed to floor 54 of the TD Bank Tower on Wellington Street, home of the restaurant Canoe. A favourite among To

For its early settlers, the sheer size of the New World was daunting. Its lakes were wider, its mountains taller, its valleys deeper than anything they had seen at home. Few images conveyed this more powerfully than the awesome vista of Niagara Falls. One seventeenth-century explorer described it as “a vast and prodigious Cadence of Water which falls down after a surprizing and astonishing manner, insomuch that the Universe does not afford it's parallel”. Today it remains one of Ontario’s must-see sites, so with my family visiting Toronto and assisted by a hapless tour company, we made our way to one of Canada’s most famous spectacles. First, a stop at Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is situated exactly where Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. A picturesque town with a cultivated charm and colonial style buildings, it was briefly the capital of Upper Canada (Ontario’s predecessor) at the end of the eighteenth century, before witnessing multiple battles in 1812 when the America