I wasn't sure that I wanted to document this trip, being sans Airstream, as it were. But, as the day has been long and interesting, I thought it worth a few words.
We had planned a trip with Emma and Charlie to the famous Inn at Lock Seven, which is in Thorold and sits right beside the mighty Welland Canal. It actually overlooks the lock, which is nice.
We had wanted to visit the area again, but this time for Charlie's benefit, and we could incorporate lake freighters, trains and the Falls into one trip. We settled on the lovely but dated Inn at Lock Seven, not only because of its panoramic view of the canal, but also because we'd been before in August 2009, on "Honeymoon 2", the little post wedding trip that supplemented the longer pre-wedding trip to Nova Scotia. The fact that the Nova Scotia trip was supposed to be the post wedding trip is a distant memory now. It's complicated and involved Canadian and British Law.
Anyway, I digress. We packed lightly for our four day, three night trip, and set off only fifteen minutes behind schedule on a bright day, albeit that the smoke from wildfires elsewhere in the great country was drifting over and making everything seem hazy. Just a few yards from home, looped back to get get some cushions from the other car, but hey, it's a long trip.
The 401, the big bad highway to Toronto, wasn't too awful, and we made good time to a pit stop at the service centre at Woodstock. While at the Service Centre I abandoned yet another attempt to buy a cup of coffee from a Starbucks outlet after my presence at the counter wasn't acknowledge by any of the four employees behind the counter, let alone any of them actually offering to serve me. It's too bad, it really is, especially as I had an identical Starbucks experience at Toronto Airport a few months back. Why do these places employ people who have no idea of how to operate in a customer service role? Oh yes, I remember, pay minimum wage (which is minimal where the job involves gratuities) and get the worst of the worse.
Back on the road and feeling a wee bit slighted that I hadn't been able to get coffee, we made even better time getting to Aldershot Go Transit station, where Charlie and Emma were going to board the curiously slow Go train into Toronto. Now here's a funny thing, especially if you're a Brit. The Go Trains outside of the Lakeshore East and the Lakeshore West routes only operate in the rush hours. There are stations at Niagara Falls (well, a few miles away from Niagara Falls), and Hamilton, but none of them offered any practical service outside of the morning and afternoon rush hours. I mean, Niagara Falls is one of Canada's biggest attractions, but you can't get there by train from Toronto (or anywhere else) during the week unless you travel in the early morning or late afternoon. It's absolutely bonkers. There are a couple of trains at the weekend, but vast swathes of the Go network shutdown for most of the day. I just don't get it. The upshot of all this was that we were dropping the kids at Aldershot on the Lakeshore West line, where there were two trains an hour, and they were heading up into the Big City to ride the TTC, that is the Toronto underground system (also buses and streetcars). I still struggle with the fact that it takes seventy minutes to cover the 58 kilometres from Aldershot to Toronto, which averages out at less than 60 kilometres an hour, or 37 miles an hour. It doesn't compare well with the speedy British trains we had used earlier in the summer.
Anyway, kids dropped off, DW and I made our way first to Bloomers Bakery in Burlington to stock up on vegan doughnuts and to get me a cup of coffee. The shop was on a very busy road, with only minimal on-street parking, and I wondered just how all the businesses along there ever attracted any customers. Having fed our faces, we made our way to the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), the expressway between Toronto and Niagara, for a run into St Catherine's, not far from our intended base for the next few days at Thorold. Unfortunately, the QEW is one of those roads that runs almost at capacity for most of the time, and even the tiniest issue creates four lanes of backed up traffic in no time at all. We found a couple of issues this Tuesday afternoon and ended up in stopped and crawling traffic for miles. It's interesting to watch all the people who were in a hurry lurching between lanes and racing, as far as they could, up dead end lanes and then having to fight to get back into the traffic, all to advance six car lengths up the road. I guess I had been like that once, or at least a bit like that, but not any more, it's far easier to just go with the general flow.
We did roll up into St Catherine's with enough time to get some lunch, but the trip took us about thirty minutes longer than planned. As soon as we left the QEW and dropped into St Catherine's, all was peaceful and calm, and while it's a busy little town, it seemed so much less fraught than being on the highway. We found the restaurant, Rise Above, and sat to enjoy some plant-based lunch. We seemed to hit the rush, but the young woman serving was super-efficient, and was getting everyone served quickly. As a counter to the awful service in Starbucks, she saw a woman come in the door and immediately called over "I'll be with you in a minute"; see, that's how you do it.
Our lone server wasn't perfect, though. She didn't write our order down and forgot that I'd ordered a side dish (and that's becoming a thing for me, too). But unlike the nonsense in the pizza place in Manchester where the server not only forgot my starter, but then said I hadn't ordered one, this server recovered brilliantly and said "Oh yes", scurrying off to get the missing dish. She was tipped well.
After lunch we motored over to our accommodation, only about ten minutes away, and checked in. The Inn at Lock Seven is dated, that's undeniable, but it does occupy a commanding view over Lock Seven on the Welland Canal, and all the rooms have a patio or balcony on the canal side of the building. It's a North American, 1960's concrete monstrosity that they can't do much about, but it's clean and reasonably priced and I'd take it over some of the overpriced but more modern places in Toronto any day. We settled in, took in the view and readied ourselves for a run back along the QEW, to Aldershot GO station, to pick up the kids.
It was rush hour, and there had been a collision on the QEW, so it was a long crawl again, although the frequent glimpses of Lake Ontario certainly made it more interesting than looking all the other vehicles stuck in the jam. By the time we made the station, we were running about thirty minutes down again, and now we had to deal with all the seriously stupid people in their cars who had come to pick up their loved ones from the station as well. There's a multi-lane drop-off point but no, the entitled numpties here had to park in the Fire Lane and part way across what was left of the access road, so effectively the entire drop-off area was blocked and locked solid. It's rank stupidity in my book, and I can't imagine having to do that every day.
Despite the look of the traffic on the QEW, the alternative routes didn't look great either, so I opted for the straightforward option, and headed back to Thorold on the QEW. The traffic had, thankfully, abated significantly and while not the quickest run I'll ever do along there, it wasn't stopped or crawling along.
We managed to get back to the hotel in time to watch one of the big bulk carriers negotiating the lock in the canal just in front of us, which was odd because it had just started negotiating the locks below lock 7 as we were leaving for Aldershot, so it had taken a long time to get up the mountain (which is canal-speak for negotiating the locks up the escarpment). Maybe they stopped for dinner.
Then fairly soon afterwards, another bulk carrier started down the mountain, using the full lock of water the previous ship had left behind. It was getting dark(ish) by this time, but it was great to see the ship all lit up, descending into the lock as the water was drained out.
We had, of course, been using mobile apps to track what ships were likely to enter the canal, and we'd taken on a newer and better one than we'd used before called Marine Traffic. With the free access you don't get all the information that you could, but it beats the constant stream of ads we were getting on the other app. I noted that there was a ship out on Lake Ontario and given that its destination required it to transit through the canal, I hoped we'd see it in the morning. The canal is, of course, a 24/7 operation, but I didn't want to be getting up in the wee small hours to watch the ships, so I didn't look to see if anything was due through.
Then it was bed time. As I said, a long and busy day, but interesting for all that. Lets see what tomorrow brings.
