Canada Diary Entry - Aug 19

The day started with rain.
Then, since it's been the final day of the Eastern-Canada trip, and it was supposed to be a long ride, it started out with a search for a Tim Horton's. (Probably nobody at home knows what this is: It's the best (which is Canadian slang for either "newest", "biggest", or "best-known") coffee shop around. This means, you find them everywhere, selling coffee and donuts.) This search turned out to be longer than anticipated; mostly because I got lost on the way back to the highway.

Visiting the "world-famous" 1000 islands was somewhat imposs due to weather conditions: Toronto weather was expected to be "very bad", and there was a weather warning for Western Ontario in effect, with actually a tornado touchdown somewhere west of Toronto. So, being trapped for one or two hours on a cruise boat seemed to be a bad idea.

On the radio, I heard a documentary about an energy generating windmill to be built in Quebec. Yes, the kind of Windmuehlen creating energy all over Europe. Here, this means not building another windmill field, but rather *the* one/first windmill. Anyway, since this is Canada and everything must be either dining or shopping compatible, they said that it is possible this will become a major "tourist attraction". Cute, eh.

Finally, I got myself a compass. In Kingston, which turned out to be "one of Canada's best-kept secrets", according to the mayor's words in a tourist map guide. No wonder, I'd say, it kept its secret from me, too.
After getting lost so many times... I bought myself a massive brass compass. And it works.

Right after that, there was something on the street I can only call "tow crash". A very unusual way of towing away a car... hopefully, I can give you a picture of that later.

Here it is:



Kingston, town of churches - one street, five churches, *in a row*. All of different (Christian) congregation. And all are always burned, at least three times... and rebuilt. Canadians like to burn their churches, or maybe they treat it as some kind of divine test. Or maybe (that's my suspicion of a conspiracy of unimaginable consequences) the different congregations just keep putting fire to each other's houses of god.

Note: Toilets in Canada are always free, meaning you don't have to pay like in Germany. Never. And they are always rated at "1.0gpf". If you don't know what that means, there's a translation as "3.8lpf".

At night, there were lots of images of flooded Toronto on TV. Some million $ of damage, flooded streets, and the tornado actually left a trace of destruction you're usually only expecting from Florida.