The Country Visits The City…And Gets Lost
The Toronto Sportsmen’s Show is currently on at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and I had the opportunity to visit yesterday.
Darrell and I left home around mid-morning, picking up his mother and brother on the way. Soon we were eastbound on the 401 and heading for Toronto. The drive in was steady with no problems on the major highways. Since Darrell was driving I managed to doze off and catch up on some sleep until I felt the car slowing down as we hit traffic entering Toronto.
Now, I suppose both of us could be considered country-folk. We are used to driving on country roads where traffic jams are a result of being stuck behind a tractor, or a result of cars stopping to let wildlife cross the road. Going into Toronto is always somewhat of a culture shock. As we inched our way off the highway (and that is a generous term for the Gardiner at any point of the day) I consulted the GPS on my phone for directions to relay to Darrell. What followed was a comedy of errors.
Our first turn off the highway had us in the left lane of traffic, a couple lanes over from where we needed to be to make the next turn. Darrell lacks my inclination towards aggressive driving and road rage. My method of changing lanes involves turning on my signal and edging into the next lane, whether or not the other vehicle wants to let me in. In this case there was no way we were going to make the turn so instead we took the next left and pulled a u-turn, got back out to the intersection, took a left and ended up in the right lane.
Eventually we ended up on Front Street, exactly where we wanted to be. None of us had ever been to the Convention Centre before so we didn’t actually know what the building looked like. We were so busy looking for parking that before we knew it we had passed the building and were now having to find a way to turn around. I don’t think Darrell was ecstatic with the directions I was giving him and it was questionable whether the next couple of left turns were on a yellow light or a red light.
Finally we made it back to Front Street and found underground parking. Fortunately my car is pretty tiny because the first spot we found was small enough to have me sucking my stomach in getting out of the door.
After a quick walk it felt like reaching the finish line when I finally saw fishing jerseys and realized we had reached our goal – the Convention Centre and the Sportsmen’s Show. I guess I was still a little frazzled because after paying for the tickets I nearly forget to take them.
The show itself was typical of most fishing/outdoors shows – lots of informative booths to stop at, seminars, boats to look at and vast amounts of gear to consider buying. Darrell and I took another chance to look at the Lund Impact we so dearly want to buy. What an awesome boat, perfectly fitting our needs. Maybe my lottery ticket will be a winner…
All-in-all it was a day well spent browsing all things fishing. And other than a close-up view of a spectacular transformer fire the trip home (when I was driving) was uneventful.
argosgirl
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