Day 5 (2011) - Dave says "Thanks, but can you fix the typo?"

We started the day at Niagara Falls with a free breakfast at the Embassy Suites. We have stayed at a bunch of Embassy Suites, and this was the biggest breakfast operation we have ever encountered. We had to be seated by a hostess, then a waitress came and took our drink order before we hit the buffet. This place had three lines to order hot food, where every other Embassy had one. Anyway, the size of the breakfast place really isn’t all that interesting, but I just thought I would mention it.

We decided to hit one more Falls-based attraction before we left town, so we once again spent $12.50 to take the incline down the huge hill (biggest scam of all time – all they had to do was build stairs and a lot of people, including us, would have at least walked one way), and bought tickets to the Journey Behind The Falls. For this attraction you take an elevator down to tunnels behind the Horseshoe Falls. There is an observation deck right near the Falls, and once again we needed ponchos, but still got wet. The strength of the water is intense and amazing to feel so close to the Falls. We checked out two tunnels that got you “behind” the Falls, but these were kind of like the old Jungle Cruise joke where the boat driver makes a big deal about seeing “the back side of water.”

We said our goodbyes to the Falls (by buying more t-shirts and other stuff – including a new hat for me) and checked out of the hotel to start our ride to Toronto. The original plan was to head right to Toronto and go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. But somewhere along the line in Niagara Falls, someone had mentioned a cute town nearby called Niagara-On-The-Lake, and when we saw a sign on the highway for that town we decided to take a detour and check it out and grab some lunch. We thought, based on what we were told or thought we were told, that the town was right off the highway, but it turns out that it was probably 20 minutes off the road. Nonetheless, we made it to Niagara-On-The-Lake and after a little bit of driving around found a place to park. It was a very cute, Hamptons-type town with nice shops and restaurants. We strolled the main street for a little bit then settled on a casual Greek place for lunch. The food there was quite good, but once again not exactly a memorable meal, so I won’t get into the details on who had what.

After lunch and a quick photo op at a park that is on what I believe to be Lake Ontario, we were on our way to Toronto.

But before we got back on the highway we needed to take a picture of something that we saw on the way into town. We passed a cemetery at the corner of a side road that had a sign right at the corner with the name of the cemetery, and a personalized message. The message read “Welcome Dave Lewis.” Well, actually it read “Welome Dave Lewis.” Evidently poor Dave Lewis was a new tenant at the cemetery, but must not have been quite important enough of a new resident to warrant a spell-check.

We had seen the sign on the way in, and it cracked us up and we decided to take a picture on the way out. But we took a slightly different way out of town and got all the way to the highway without seeing the sign. Since it was already kind of late and by the time we got to Toronto we would not have had time for the Hall of Fame anyway, we decided to turn around to find the sign. Turns out it was about one block from where we got back on the road out of town. It may have added 30 minutes or so to the trip, but it was worth it.

Over the past two years I have booked a lot of hotels basically sight unseen and, if I give myself a mulligan for the Syracuse Red Roof Inn, I have batted 1.000. All of the hotels have been in good or strategic locations and have been perfectly fine. Well, my streak ended today. I booked a hotel called The Grand Hotel & Suites for a few reasons. The description said it was in walking distance to the places we were likely to visit (HOF, Rogers Center, CN Tower). However, in driving through the city to get to the hotel, it became clear that this hotel was not exactly close to the places we would visit, and it is not in the most appealing part of town.

From the pictures it also looked like a nice high-class hotel. Well, it considers itself a high-class hotel, based on the cavity search I had to endure just to check in (OK, not a cavity search, but they did spend way too much time trying to “verify my address” – no idea what that meant). When they finally got permission from the Prime Minister to give me my room keys, I had to ask two bell-men to help me load up the luggage cart, as there were about 15 steps between the street and the entrance to the hotel, so I could not just load up the cart from the back of the car.

Then, since I opted for self-parking, I had to maneuver my mini-van into and around a parking garage that was clearly made for Smart Cars only. I wasn’t 100% sure that I would make the height clearance, then to get around a turn I had to lube the car up with butter. I finally parked my car (about 3 inches from the car next to me) and headed upstairs where more fun awaited.

Let me list the room’s transgressions:

• Hair on the bed
• Hair in the tub
• A clearly used towel on the back of the bathroom door
• Two hangars in the closet for robes, but only one robe
• The TV in the living room area maxxed out a volume that only dogs could hear
• The toilet didn’t flush (and we hadn’t used it yet)
• The room has free wifi and also advertizes that it has a highspeed internet service by connecting with an Ethernet cord, but there is no Ethernet jack in the room

Based on the first 4 items above, Debbie headed down to the lobby to complain. On her way, she ran into a hotel employee and asked him about whether it was customary to leave a towel hanging behind the bathroom door. He looked at her like she had three heads, and said “can I see your room?” He came in and confirmed that this was not normal, and told us to call the manager to send up housekeeping. The manager sent someone right away and she grabbed the towel immediately and looked at the hair in the tub and called housekeeping. Two housekeepers then showed up to completely re-do the room.

The other issue came right when we entered the room. We always call for more towels, pillows and sheets (to use as an extra blanket for the kids, to cover the blanket on our bed and to use beneath the air bed), and I did the same today. When I asked for these things she asked me to confirm how many people were staying in the room. For almost all of the hotels I book, I book it as 2 adults and 2 kids because a lot of hotels now don’t allow 5 people in a standard room. So when I said 2 adults and 2 kids, she didn’t even leave it at that. She then asked me the ages of the kids. Only when I had passed her little test did she agree to send the stuff. Only problem is that now Amanda has to stay in the car (just kidding – but every time someone came to the room to fix something I thought that they would go back and compare the people here to the reservation and I would get a call – could still happen).

Once the room was clean, we headed a few blocks away to what could be described as Toronto’s version of Times Square, or at least something close to it. We grabbed dinner at a brew-pub, with Debbie, Ethan and I sharing two thin-crusted pizza-type things called Farfegnugens or Hassenpfeffer or something like that (they are actually called Flammekueche).

We then walked around for a little bit, found an ice cream store that mixed in a topping by hand (tasty) and stopped for a few minutes to watch a street show. The street show’s theme was playing with fire, but after they kind of set their equipment on fire by mistake, we didn’t think it was a great idea to stick around too long.

We walked back through Beirut to our hotel, called for the toilet to be plunged, and got the kids ready for bed. Tomorrow the plan is to go to the CN Tower early before it gets too crowded, then do a tour of the Rogers Center (Blue Jays stadium) and then go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. That all assumes we don’t get thrown out of the hotel for having 5 people here.