Until Thursday, I'll be in Toronto, Canada attending and speaking at the Yet Another Perl Conference, North America, 2005.
Unfortunately, the only real drawback of my 4.5-year-old Powerbook is its processor speed, which prevents me from seriously sorting and editing the photographs I take. Once I'm back in Boston with my powerful desktop I'll post a pile of them to my Flickr account.
Emily, Kevin and I arrived in Toronto yesterday evening. Driving from Boston to Toronto took about 10 hours, which included a stop at Niagara Falls. We arrived in time to catch a Toronto Argonauts game and a tiny (distant) fireworks show.
Today, Emily and I went to Paramount Canada's Wonderland to ride roller coasters. It takes about an hour to get there (via the St. Patrick subway stop and GO transfer bus) and is well worth an extra day to visit. The lines weren't awfully long, the heat wasn't too bad, and the water wasn't obscenely expensive. Ridiculously, yes, but not obscenely.
I haven't been on a roller coaster in years. We started with a standard, modern coaster that locks you in with a shoulder harness and twirls you around a few times. For us larger folks, note that most rides aren't built for those of us with XL-sized shoulders; I was whipped around quite a bit. We also rid on a standing-up coaster that I got some nice photos of. The most fun coasters were the two wooden clackity-clack ones. Wooden coasters not only have that "Is this crotchety thing really going to hold me?" feel, but the surroundings of the ride were much closer making it seem like the ride was going faster. At one point the coaster went into an almost completely-black tunnel --- creepy!
Toronto is quite probably the cleanest city I've ever visited. Every major sidewalk appears freshly swept and there's hardly any litter or rotting bags of trash like in Boston. The trains are nearly spotless! The city features such novel inventions as public recycling bins and credit-card-based parking—the latter is supposed to hit Boston sometime in the next fifteen years.
I've finally met a few people I've only known online, or written a book with, such as Ingy and chromatic. Tomorrow will be even more fun.
