High Park Adventures.

Yesterday we visited our favourite corner of our favourite park. It's called High Park and is smack bang within the neck of the woods we've chosen to live in. It is a testament to Toronto's commitment to green space. This park is about 15 minutes from downtown and it is huge!

We have always referred to this playground as the 'castle playground'. You can see why. 

Poppet has been wanting to return to it for years and was very excited to visit at last.

And guess what, monkey bars are in abundance!

After an hour or so at the playground (which was built by the local community) we visited the free zoo around the corner. There are some very different rules in Canada regarding zoos. In fact, we saw some extremely exotic animals at the local pet store the other day, think Macaws, Frill Necked-Lizards etc.

I don't really like that kind of thing, but there are some wonderful zoos here which exist purely to rescue animals and replenish species. We will visit plenty of those later.

But for now, you can have your Bison at the zoo, or you can grab a steak at most pubs if you prefer...

That's a lot of steak right there!

After so many days of hotels, apartment hunting and scanning the net for a new car it was lovely just to get outside in the sun.

Naturally we got all excited about the squirrels and chipmunks, receiving weird looks from the locals. They regard them as pests, and rightly so. I've seen a squirrel open a zip-lock bag on someone's stroller in a few seconds flat.

We finished the day by choosing an apartment (more on that later) and grabbing a bite to eat at a local diner. What looked like a dingy little pub actually served quite reasonable fare and the service was excellent (because they work for tips!). Millie had a kids' meal, you can't go anywhere without having a menu and crayons for kiddies here, and everyone talks to kids like they're grown up and deserve respect. Millie's meal was a bargain because it was Tuesday.

We're off now to measure up the apartment for the mammoth (or perhaps I should say 'bison') Ikea run. Blech.

And then we might bore ourselves silly looking at cars for a while.

Double blech!

J.