25 May 2023 - Toronto (CN Tower & Toronto Islands)

We headed in to Evviva Cafe for some breakfast this morning. A smoked salmon eggs bene for me which is mediocre, but the pancakes looked amazing so we’ve decided we’ll have brekkie here tomorrow before heading off. 

CN tower: 

We joined a big queue to buy tickets and while we were waiting in line, we jumped online instead and ended up heading in much earlier than the people in front of us. There were the obligatory photos in front of the green screen that we eventually managed to convince the girl we weren’t interested in. Seriously, $45 for a rather badly photoshopped photo! I could do it at home if I really wanted to. If they charged less, we may have been interested. We saw lots of people knock back these ‘deals’ at each of the tourist places - look at the K-Mart model people! Offer things for less, sell much more. 

The elevator ride up was fun. 116 floors in 58 seconds (22kph). As with all of these things, it was a glass front lift so that you’d get the full effect. The viewing platform at the top was really well set up. Most sections were wall to floor glass, others had a little ledge (for the scaredy-cats). The views over Toronto were really good and gave us a much better picture of the city and what was around. We looked at the city and around to the other side to look out over the islands. One of the islands has an airport and the landing strip and planes look excellent from the observation deck. We sat down with a bottle of water to do the ‘take ten’ to soak it all in thing. Being still for a bit is a good thing. 

Toronto Islands:

Don’t waste your time or money on one of the sunset or city view river tours. Catch the ferry across to the Toronto Islands for a few dollars and get the same view. You’ll even get to sit on brightly coloured chairs in the sun while you wait for the ferry. We went across to Centre Island (yes, it really is called that) and had an excellent view of the city both over and back. Once we arrived on the island, we got two slices of pizza and headed down to the waterfront. There were bugs everywhere - not sure what they were, they didn’t bite, but they certainly swarmed. The pizza slices were pretty good, one pepperoni and the other a supreme, and it was nice to sit there just gazing out and taking some time to absorb it all. There were some locals there having a BBQ and it was really hard not to go over and ask if we could join in as it smelled so good!

We walked through the centre of the park on Centre Island to get to their pier on the other side. We passed lots of beautiful flowers including tulips and a very large fountain. Speaking of tulips, the guy on the Niagara tour said that every year the Netherlands give them tulips because they hid the Princess (maybe the Queen) during WWII and she gave birth there - hence the yearly tulip thank you. We made it to the pier and gazed over Lake Ontario - no dry land in sight. And it was cold. We hiked it back to the other side to make the ferry trip back. The view of Toronto is amazing, the city looks beautiful from the water. 

We hit up the Irish pub for dinner again. And cocktails again. And then staggered back to our AirBnB with the noisy bed. 

Check out our Tower and Island photos here.