​Kelsey's Travel Blog!​
I travel not to escape life, but to be sure that life will not escape me! Come join me!
Electric Dance Music blaring, rolling alien green hills racing by, covered in lush green trees giving it an almost pillowed look, windows rolled down with the wind in my hair and sun warming my face from the passenger seat; this is how our Labor Day trip, what we have now dubbed Toronto 2013, began as we rode out of the city of Philadelphia, bound for Reading, PA to scoop up another member of our party, Hannah.
Canada isn't exactly the Labor Day hot spot destination for most, but after one of our sorority sisters, Andrea, relocated to Buffalo in upstate New York for nursing school, there was hardly a reason not to go play in Canada for a night with 5 of your other closest friends... And play we did!
It's true when they say that friendship knows no time, nor distance. for the first time in many of our lives, our post-grad lives are beginning to take form, and many of us are beginning to understand the roll our college friendships will play in our post grad life. Charlotte has just begun her first big girl job in IT for a large financial services company, Hannah is finishing up her tourism and hospitality degree with her senior internship, Emelia is in the final leg of her undergraduate education, Emily is currently working full time in education, and Andrea is kicking ass in nursing school in Buffalo, and I’m finishing up my own degree, yet all of us found ourselves putting our real lives on hold back at home, abandoning all sense of adult responsibility in Charlotte’s Toyota, dearly named Henry, and Andrea’s little blue blueberry car, heading to Toronto.
Toronto, Canada
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Bright and early Saturday morning, we woke up at Hannah's house in Reading where Charlotte, Emelia, and I spent Friday night to avoid Labor Day traffic, quickly packed up the car, hit up Wawa and the local bagel shop, and we were on our way, coffees in hand, headed for Buffalo New York. 6.5 hours we spent chatting about topics from the current conflict in Syria, to our current love interests, to our future career goals following graduation.
We arrived to Andrea’s house 6.5 hours and 400 miles later where we met up with Emily, one of our other sorority sisters who had also made her escape from the real world only a few days earlier to spend some time with her law school man-friend in Pittsburg, only to ditch him to meet up with us in buffalo... We clearly have our priorities straight.
After overly enthusiastic sorority girl screams with lots if hugs and conversations going a million miles a minute, we got some quick noms from a Buffalo favorite, The Spot, a chain cafe with phenomenal sandwiches and wraps, and were already on our way to the American-Canadian duty free shop to pick up some tax-free Grey Goose and captain Morgan. We then joined the masses looking to make their way to the other side of the river.
We flashed our blue passports to the Canadian border agent and were northern bound to Toronto! After 500 miles and 9 hours of driving, we had finally arrived.
It's a common habit amongst travelers to be so focused on far away destinations that you are blind to some seriously awesome places; case in point: Toronto, Canada. Toronto, the largest city in Canada and the 5th largest in North America, is a booming city! Skyscraper cranes decorated the Toronto skyline; a sign of a fast-growing, up and coming, international city. Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world, with around 49% of its residents being non-Canadian born. This type of diversity paves way for top-notch ethnic food, eclectic neighborhoods, and a phenomenal nightlife, all of which we undoubtedly found in Toronto.
Thanks to border traffic, we arrived with only a few hours to spare before our reservations at a restaurant called Epicure located on Queen’s Street. We checked in quickly to our Holiday Inn Express, which involved some serious covert actions since there were 6 of us and we had only booked a room for four. Good thing the Holiday Inn is in the hospitality business and not interrogation. We snuck everyone upstairs to our cruise-cabin size room, had a few jumps on the beds, washed away the grime from a full day’s worth of travel, and headed out to the restaurant.
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The Epicure Cafe and Grill not only yielded unbelievable food and an awesome wine selection, but it also was the setting for a reunion; something that we were not expecting. Normally, a party of 6 at the table next to us wouldn't have received any notice from six sorority sisters who hadn't seen each other in months, yet by chance, Hannah happened to look over as they were finishing up the meal, only to realize a friend of hers she met a few months earlier in Munich happened to be sitting with his family at that exact table. Serendipitous to say the least! Thanks to his family leaving and Dan not wanting to let this reunion go to waste, our party gained another until it was time to head out to the club.
The more I travel, the more I begin to see that the world is truly small, and occasionally, the universe will bring you back together with someone from you path for no other reason than to remind you of how small our world really is!
After finishing up dinner, we were off to find our place of party for the evening. Thanks to a few wrong turns and some seriously helpful Canadians, were told to try out a club called Uniun by a bouncer at another club we were waiting in line for. Luckily for us, this wasn’t Philadelphia or New York, and after describing what kind of scene we were looking for, the bouncers were kind enough to lead us in the right direction, even if that direction wasn’t towards their establishment.
We knew the moment we walked into to Uniun and paid the $20 cover fee, this was EXACTLY where we wanted to be. The bass could be felt in our heart as hundreds of young, good-looking people danced in unison to some of the mainstream and non-mainstream dance music songs. Although this is not where I would normally find myself on weekends in Philadelphia, for Toronto, it was EXACTLY what we had been looking for, and from 11:00pm-2:00am, we danced harder and laughed louder than I had in months! Well done, Uniun… Well done.
The following morning, we were up and ready to enjoy our final few hours in Toronto before heading back to Buffalo for Sunday night. Thanks to the advice of one of my personal travel friends, Aidan, who has made a few appearances in this blog, we headed to the Kensington Market neighborhood. This eclectic neighborhood, which reminded me a little bit of South Street with a hint of Kreuzberg or Prenzlauerberg in Berlin, was located right next to Toronto University, and was a mecca for all things weird. Want to see a car with a plan growing out of it? Check! How about a building with an alien on it? Yeah, they have that too. It also had a ton of ethnic food; from Indian, to Chinese, to Mexican. We settled for some of the best and most authentic Mexican food I had ever had outside of Mexico itself.
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Finally, our short but sweet night in Toronto had to come to and end. We hopped back into the car and were once again headed Stateside to return to our normal lives. The adventure ended as quickly as it began, yet it was one of the best trips I had even been on in my 6 years of international travel.
Charlotte put it really well as we put Buffalo and the great white north in our review mirrors. She said that we could have been all put in a cardboard box and we still would have had just as much fun as we did being in Toronto. That just reaffirms the fact that travel is not about the destination, but it is about the people you travel with. I could not have asked for a better group to explore Toronto with, and I can’t wait for our next trip together. DC 2013? Montreal 2014? China 2015? Wherever life may take us, there is one thing we can be sure of: no matter where we go, the adventure starts the moment we come together, and that, my friends, is true friendship.
