The world's longest street!

So I'm blogging from beautiful Toronto, post-Juliana/Rob's wedding... so backing up, or that is a quick recap of the weekend in Ontario backwards.

Tonight Juliana and Rob took Noel and I out for a quick tour of this huge city in their gorgeous silver Mercedes CLK 550 convertible, top down of course, on the way and post-going to dinner in the Distillery District down by the east lakeside. As we drove from their condo in the Rosedale area (north of downtown) we kept encountering 'Yonge Street'. Rob told us that YONGE STREET was the longest continual street in the world, I believe going from Lake Ontario to Lake Superior...weird huh? So before dinner we drove as the sun set down thru Yorkville (kinda of Rodeo Drive) thru the financial district and ended up in the coolest renevated 1830's brick wharehouse that were refirbished old beer distilleries. After dinner we cruised under the city lights of the night by the skyscrapers of Scotiabank and TD Watermark, down to the theatre district and by the Sky Dome and CN tower (Sky Dome= their Qwest stadium and CN tower = their Space Needle ...though both are much bigger than Seattle's equivelents). Then thru Chinatown, Little Italy and the University. Toronto is definitely a mix of New York City and Vancouver B.C.

Going backwards... earlier in the day. We started the day with a day after wedding brunch at our hosts amazing 2 bedroom, 4 bathroom Elle Decor condo with family and outta towners, which was lovely. Ray and Brent (our hosts who put Noel and I up so graciously) cooked some amazing quiches among other things. After the last couple days, we has so much fun with Juliana and Rob's families along with some of their close friends...like the Maid of Honor, Mary Ann, from Waterloo (1-1/2 hour west of T.O.), and who looked and sounded just like Gov. Sarah Palin...who we kept calling until it stuck, poor lady. (see 'Sarah Palin' in her Nordstrom dress 2nd from the right in this photo)

The night before, after the wedding, Noel and I went to Church Street which is T.O.'s gay district and had some drinks (all Canadian, Labats Blue and Keets beers and shots of Crown Royal) at Woody's (http://www.woodystoronto.com/)which is this huge gay bar complex which was cool, and where they filmed all the bar scenes for the 5 years of Showtimes "Queer as Folk". We then went up the street to a bar/restaurant called the Byzantian (http://byz.ca/), which was really hip and cool, and I later found out where Luis' Josh bartended/waited when he came back to T.O. Hmmm...interesting. I don't see Josh there. After one martini Noel was 3 sheets to the wind, and after getting ketchup potato chips down the road we scurred back home via taxi by 1am. Keep in mind we had been drink pretty much from 4pm on, wedding reception on, all day long beer, wine, champagne.

So the wedding Saturday...how lovely. Loved every minute of it. It was a perfect day, 75 degrees, sunny, and was outside in their condo's shared cabanna room (where the reception was immediately following). There were 70 peeps, and the ceremony was short. The speeches after were long but great from the bride, groom, BM and MOH. I hung alot with 'The Goddesses', Juliana's GF's that I had hung with a couple years earlier in PV...Heidi, Rose and Beatrice. Fun Canadian ladies...love them. We had hours of fun people watching, being caddy and such. Juliana looked beautiful in a very non-traditional bride's attire...in a silver grey silk jacket, was same colored skirt that had random oval sequins and was a little below the knee. She looked stunning, and perfert for a 50 y.o. woman who was anything but a traditional bride. I also hung out with the bartender, Natasha, who was from Nova Scotia and preceded to tell me about Canadian beers, and wine, and then later invited us to meet her at her other job as bartender downtown, where there was a 50th b-day party of the coach of the Toronto basketball team, the Rapters. That would have been fun I suppose, but 1) Noel and I wanted to gay it up a bit, 2) straight sportsbar with a bunch of Canadian basketball players...maybe fun? maybe not, 3) I didn't even know they had a basketball team...and I said "that sounds fun, I love hockey players" (ooops!). It was an interesting crowd, outside of a handful of Americans there were many Brits and lots of Ontarians. Earlier in the day, Ray and Brent took us to lunch on Church Street and showed us many gay sites for later. It was truly a beautiful weekend. They were such nice guys. We got them a little gift certificate for a restaurant down the street "Lakes" as a thank you, along with one also for Jewels and Rob to enjoy.

Friday night we arrived, via our rental car, from Buffalo to Toronto at 5pm. There was a rehearsal/outta towners dinner down the street at an Italian place called Piccalos. Very fun. Prefix menu and free flowing winde. Good times. We played a little game as an ice breaker which was actually fun.

Still going backwards...we left Buffalo at noon-ish and stopped for a couple hours at Niagara Falls. Totally breathtaking. I can't believe it was as amazing as I imaged. Cool! Now one more thing off my 'bucket list'. It was funny too...the U.S. side was old school, old town, but the Canada side was friggen Las Vegas with casinos, Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood, etc. So glad we drove through. By driving thru, between Niagara and T.O., we found out it was wine country, and that there were 30+ wineries there. I have never heard of an Ontario wine, probably because they do not or can't import them into Washington State. Conversely, we could not find any Washington wines or beers in the huge renovated train station liquor store next door.

There is so much to do...we already know we have to come back next year (or two)....The first week of September would be fun, good weather then,wine country tours, theatre 'broadway' shows, and also the Toronto International Film Festival!!!

SIDE NOTE BACK IN SEATTLE: So the hour before we left Toronoto to drive back to Buffalo, we caught Shelly in town from New York City selling her goods to a couple stores in T.O.....what are the chances??? So cool to see her period, but even more surreal outside of the country and totally unplanned until hours earlier! Life is so cool sometimes how it works that way! ....and yes, again, what a small world!

SIDE NOTE #2": We had extra time before dropping off our rental car, so Noel and I spent an hour downtown Buffalo. Great architecture, but the most depressed and depressing city I have ever been to...boarded up buildings and garbage everywhere. Very sad. Noel was sure they were zombies...."don't look into their eyes, or show emotion...they will know we don't belong!" he said.