The neat thing about staying with friends in different parts of the city is that one gets to explore a Toronto not usually part of our "scene" in Mimico.

After spending the morning at Wychwood Barns Farmers' Market, we did a little geocaching, which took us through a beautiful, wooded enclave of disgustingly huge private mansions near Taddle Creek and on to the Tollkeeper's Cottage, where we stopped for a comprehensive historical tour!

Afterwards, I noticed one of the futuristic new streetcars parked in an adjacent lot, and snapped the pic below right.  (They're apparently scheduled to roll out beginning in August.)

Having missed most of winter due to our Argentina adventures, we're having a new love affair with Toronto in summer, and bright, sunny days like this past Saturday are doing a great job to help keep us deluded about the city's harsher times of year!

Off to Belem today, to visit the Belem Tower and the Monastery, do a little geocaching, and eat some famous Belem Pasteis…  Lisbon and its surroundings are rich in museums and cultural centres, and today was the day we intended to see at least some of the many offerings.

We had our Lisbon 72-hour card, so were able to get onto public transit for FREE, and took the train out past the monument to the explorers to the Belem Tower.  From there, we also had a panoramic view of the Golden Gate, er no, replica bridge, and the Rio De Jan-, er, no, also a replica, Jesus statue!

Next it was off to the Monastery of St Jeronimo, which recently celebrated 500 years.  Inside the stone walls of the monastery we found a sculpture that had been crafted by Grade 3 and 4 students at a nearby school.  Look closely… can you see what it is made of?!

After the Monastery, we had the opportunity to take in a show at the Planetarium, a real treat for me; I LOVE planetariums, and was really disappointed when the one next to the ROM in Toronto shut down several years ago.  My infatuation with the projector dates me, however; my partner laughed her head off at my fascination and amazement with the large, archaic mechanical wonders of the 1970s and 80s, especially when she saw that many of the supplemental images where being  projected via slide projector!!!

Click any image above to enlarge.

Perhaps the greatest highlight of the day trip was our stop at Belem Pasteis, to try their famed egg tarts.  We had heard they were very good, served hot, and customarily sprinkled with cinnamon, that they come out fresh from the oven every 15 minutes, that people line up from morning ‘til night to eat them… but we were totally unprepared for just how delectably tasty these treats really were:  a freshly baked flaky pastry surrounds the still-warm tender egg tart centre… as the fellow traveller at the next table remarked when he saw us order seconds, “you can’t have just one”!  (He himself had just packed away two "to go" -- after the several he had devoured at his table!)

Finally, we decided to take the tram back to Lisbon, to look for a grocery store near our hotel where we could purchase the much-anticipated Port to take back to eager friends and family in Canada.  We did so, and also snagged a few other souvenirs, before returning to our hotel, a hot bath, and – finally – bed. 

Tomorrow, our last day, promises to be filled with adventure once again (so much for the relaxing vacation!), as we head out to Sintra by bus, followed by one last supper and evening out with friends here in the city, before madly packing our bags for the long trip home on Saturday.

How good it was to be back at our home church this morning!  

After a summer of traveling, it was nice to be back in the folds of the familiar, despite the positive church experience we had had in PEI.  Worship is – in my opinion –  as much about the company you keep as about the sermon preached by a specific pastor, or the songs sung by a particular choir.  Just being together and sharing the collective experience of those things, catching up with people’s personal news (much of it very sad unfortunately; our church had a death and several illnesses over the summer), seeing the sea of smiling faces at the front of the church during children’s time, and being in the presence of people with whom I have a shared history presented a much-needed re-grounding for my tattered soul.

And then, it was a bike ride along the lake to the airport for my first flight lesson of the fall.  Yep, I flew a plane today!  Couldn’t remember if I could still do it, actually, but it was quite good in the end, considering it’s been a full three months since I last piloted an aircraft!!!

Flying offers a high (no pun intended) like no other:  After a somewhat hellish week on the home front, and a coincidentally-hotter-than-Hades first week back in my 32-degree-Celcius classroom at school, I wasn’t even sure that I had the stamina to taxi off the apron, let alone do all the radio work and simultaneously fly the plane.  But, as it turns out, flying is an immediate antidote for any kind of emotional trauma...  there is something quite spectacular about pulling back the throttle, and -- moments later -- soaring over the city!  After my lesson, I felt genuinely refreshed and newly optimistic about a variety of concerns, both personal and professional!

We finished off the day with a little picnic dinner at Leslie Spit, and some geocaching at Sherbourne Common before heading home for bedtime and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, which we have just started reading together this week.

A Sunday like this one is surely the medicine needed for an excellent week ahead!

Finally found a little red bison geocache that had been troubling us for some time… My girlfriend, one of my sons and I had looked for over an hour last year, to no avail.  We were convinced it had been moved or stolen. 

As it turned out, we were wrong: Since we left the island, five more people found this little cache stashed at Red Head Harbour near St Pete’s Harbour, PEI.

So, we were determined to find it ourselves this year!

Trevor, Tats, the boys and I  climbed on our bikes, and set out for Red Head.  We decided to try and take the washed-out road that united, in swampy and sometimes impenetrable slendour, our Harbour with the small fishing inlet of Red Head.  The road is no longer in general use, but when the tide is out, especially during a dry summer like this one, the muddy, marshy path becomes sufficiently negotiable for humans, and even bikes, though we did have to dismount and encourage the our two-wheeled companions along through some of the swampier parts of the road.

Once we had safely arrived on the other side, we stowed our bikes between two lobster shacks, and began snooping around.

Our geocaching experience over the past year had taught us what a “bison” looks like (indeed, we had found one at confederation bridge, on our way home, at the end of last summer, and several since that time).  We had also experienced the frustration of GPS coordinates that—for whatever reason—were slightly “off”. 

So we reconsulted the information and clue given on the geocaching website, and widened our search circle.

It was not long before Alex located the tiny cache, cleverly hidden I won’t say where (so that other cachers reading this blog won’t have their experience ruined by a spoiler!), and we celebrated our victorious discovery with smiles and photos before heading back – this time along the main road, and stopping to visit a friend who had just picked a bunch of wild blueberries to share (yum!) -- to Morell for icecream on our way home.

We saw the neatest thing the other night... out geocaching near dusk, we came across a pair of geese near a train yard.  One was sitting on the ground next to the fence beside the tracks, apparently unbothered by the noisy trains that screetched continuously past.  This goose's wing looked contorted into a rather uncomfortable shape, and I wondered if she was hurt.

I snuck closer to inspect, but was hissed at vehemently by the sitting goose's partner, who was not deterred by my approach, but rather, made it abundantly clear that I was not welcome so near.  I soon figured out why:  The sitting goose's large wing was shielding a small gaggle of goslings!!!

After a while, a fuzzy, yellow head poked up from under the wing, and Mother Goose turned her neck around to preen her baby, then poked it back into position next to its siblings under her broad, feathered wing.

I was lucky to get close enough for a kind-of-okay shot of the babies snuggling in together, before her partner made it clear that that was enough excitement for one night!

We've been scootering a lot lately, since the four of us got scooters... it's a little lower maintenance and "ready to go" than cycling, especially with kids and dog.

On a recent trip to San Remo's for gelato, Jasper joined us and tried his paw at scootering.