🌴 Foodie Vacation Micro-dosing: Day 1 Report

Woke up early and gathered up all those "can only be packed in the morning" items.

Refreshed my CAA-powered gas-price data-mining-and-analysis spreadsheet, and opted for Brockville (Ontario) for the road trip's gas stop.

Started the day with an A&W breakfast combo, for two.

The initial drive was harsh. The lingering blizzard produced low-visibility road conditions. Rolled westwards towards Toronto at a paltry 70 km/hr for couple of hours.

After the gas stop in Brockville, the weather conditions cleared up very nicely and we were able to cruise at max speed.

The Toronto locals were surprisingly very hesitant driving around in "just a little slush" highway conditions, reducing their speeds down as low as 80 km/hr when there is very little traffic and very little danger. On city streets, they roll around at 35 km/hr on average, too, in 50 km/hr zones. What's up with that?

We checked-in at the Westin Harbour Castle hotel. Thanks to Willow's superpowers, our room was upgraded to a premium-lakeview type! Bummer that we went through quite a bit of trouble over room amenities – missing shower gel, shampoo and conditioner – twice! The hotel brought up 2x conditioner instead of shampoo + condition their first time. Sheesh.

Late-lunch was Oden + Onigiri from Omusubi Bar Suzume. The lady running the shop missed the "2x" number for Oden and Eggplant-flavoured rice balls, so I had to do a second drive to her shop to pick those up! Bonus: she threw in an extra Oden!

Zzz'd out for a short spell to recover from all the road-warrior weariness.

At night, we went to see the Nordic Lights public-space art exhibition. Along the way, we stopped by the Jack Layton bicycle statue. The light show was cool. There was even a tall, model girl decked out in black and latex doing a photoshoot with the light art installations.

On the way back to the hotel, we picked up a crazy unique snack from Cuppa Tea. "Pineapple Butter Bun" – it's basically a deadlier version of the classic pineapple bun, having a slice of delicious sweet?-and-salty butter in the middle of it. I guess they make the bun first, and then slice it, and then insert the butter square. Hello, heart-attack city!