What I'd like to do is share my five day experience/trip to see Rush in Toronto with the readership here, because I know how much I probably would have wanted to at least hear and read about someone's trip to TO if I couldn't go. I hope you've all taken your proper medication this evening, and there's a whole lot of information coming your way. I'll do one post a day until the story is over. Our stay was from Saturday June 28th through Thursday July 2nd. Although lengthy, these posts will be well written and very informative! I just wish everyone who wanted to be there could have been.

DAY ONE
First off, I wasn't soloing the trip, I (Pennsylvania) went along with Charles (San Diego), Mark (San Francisco), Laurie (Los Angeles) and Shaun (Dallas). Charles flew into PA so we could drive up together and then we had to pick up the others from the airport and deliver them into the heart of the city where they were staying at various hotels and bed and breakfasts. Charles and I left PA about 10:30 a.m., and made it to YYZ in about 6.5 hours. The whole way in the truck, we occasionally screamed, "YEAH!" "Oh YEAH!" and "RUSH!!!" out the windows at unsuspecting pedestrians and motorists, who really didn't have a clue as to why we were so fired up.

Lake Ontario was beautiful upon first sight. We went up through Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and the scenery was great. Drove over a couple of really high bridges and stuff...the driving was fun except when we got to Toronto. Two things stand out here. The first is the way the city is laid out...hard to see street names, and all the streets are just names, not numbers in logical order that you can follow. Second, no one in Toronto seems to possess the ability to accurately give directions anywhere, even whithin a few blocks. Maps eventually helped (but even had missing streets and omissions), but it was more like we just stumbled upon our destinations the whole time with lots of driving around. Taxi drivers have the typical kamakazi attitude, and the street cars, well, you just get out of their way when you aren't driving straight down the tracks in front of or behind them. It was indeed challenging. And fun! By the end of the trip, Charles commented the fact that we had probably had more moving violations and other infractions in five days than in our entire lives in the U.S. Good thing I had the truck. Lots of curbs to go over! The worst were the one way streets that suddenly turned one way the other way mid-block! However, we all escaped without any encounters from the Canadian Mounted Police! It was quite interesting to see that there were hardly any pickup trucks around..which was what I was driving. Maybe like on the third day we actually saw another truck.

Charles and I were stoked about our room. We scored a "suite" with a living room, kitchen, killer TV, pool, sauna, exercise room...until we got there! for like $85C per night we found this place on the Internet, and the photos looked great and stuff...but the kicker was the place was pretty much a dive, and looked nothing like the photos online! Figures. And the 'Net descriptions also failed to tell us that it was in the heart of the city's gay and lesbian section!!! On one of our first trips up the elevator, we saw a gay male couple dressed in complete leather, chains, loincloths, black leather hats and nipple clamps. They were the "Village People" looking type. Talk about International culture!

Not only were we in the gay part of town, there was the city's annual Gay Pride celebration going on about 2 blocks away all day Saturday and Sunday. I can't begin to describe this scene...it was a gay block party from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. each day..thousands of people wearing all the wierdest fashions...and wearing nothing at all. Toronto just recently passed a law that ALLOWS women to be topless anywhere, anytime they want to...and the Pride weekend visitors took full advantage of this new, ah, legislation. It was quite the scene. Laurie and I were curious what all the hoopla was about one day, and we walked in and amongst the thousands of people on the street and checked out everyone showing their stuff, dancing and walking around topless, and there were also plenty of interesting guys wearing (or not wearing) costumes and levels of clothing that I would prefer to not try and describe! Our room was on the 8th floor of the Town Inn, and we had a lot of fun yelling, screaming and checking out the scene from above, or rather, from a safe distance!

The first thing I really wanted to do was go up CN Tower, of course, and Laurie and Charles and I did that our first full day in TO. The observation deck is over 1,100 feet high, a complete panoramic city/lake view, and the real kicker was the fact that one of the decks had a glass floor on it, where you could stand and look death in the eyes right between your legs....it was extremely creepy, to say the least. Like parachuting without a parachute, I guess! We had lunch there, did souvineer shopping and stuff...the typical tourist thingys and thangys.

Like in any new city that one visits, there's lots of walking to do, and Charles and I were really lucky in the fact that our hotel was in the heart of the city. Before going to the city I found a Toronto Online type of WWW site and spent a lot of time surfing around looking for things to see and do. I wanted to check out Younge Street, which looked like a great cultural/youth/young/nightlife area, and it turned out to be correct. Everything one needs is on Younge street...money exchange, nearby banks, smoke shops, food, shopping, Eaton Center (big shopping mall), strip clubs, you name it...kinda like the Broadway of the city (like New York, etc...).

The people in Toronto are a complete international mix. There is a growing and already large segment of the population that is Indian (not native, but the country) and Oriental. It looked to be about 1/4 White, 1/4 Indian, 1/4 Oriental and 1/4 all others. Most of the people in TO seemed to be happy and energetic, and the young segment of the population is very large. The dominant age group seemed to be from 15 to about 35 most of the time.

Downtown is a busy place, and it's hard to drive because people just walk out in front of your car, even if you are going 30MPH. More often than not, the right of way was to pedestrians, which is the exact opposite here in the U.S. It's like pedestrians here are just targets; in Toronto, they have all the right-of- way. The streets were mostly one or two lanes wide in each direction, making for quite cramped conditions driving and walking.

We wanted to go out very badly on Saturday night, but we were so tired from all the travel, getting lost trying to pick people up and coordinate what everyone wanted to do and see, and after the trip to CN Tower (which took about 4 hours or so), we decided to just go back to the air conditioned palace at the Town Inn and watch some TV and hang out and plan the next day's activities. So our first full day in TO was fun and exciting, quite cultural by design, and exhausting!

I was very impressed with the people in our group. We had all planned this trip using email and snail mail...we had our tickets to both shows, everything went great as far as hooking up in a foreign country at the airport, there were no legal/identification/immigration problems for our air travelers...and my truck hadn't been hit by one of those trollys. We were all really, really stoked, really happy, and really ready for the show in two days.

***TOMORROW:***
-Finding the band's hotel by accident- Ooooops!
-A trip to the Orbit Room/Dave Murphy Band does Rush covers!
-More Gay Pride activities!
-A sunset cruise on Lake Ontario