Category: On Travels and Adventures

Yesterday, The Wife and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Starling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY. We left Friday night, actually, and stayed in a hotel in Rochester, driving the rest of the way to the Festival yesterday morning; we drove all the way home after the Festival day was ended, with a stop at a fried chicken place we like a lot in Webster, NY (a suburb of Rochester, northeast of the city).

We’ve been going to the Sterling Festival for years. I want to say our first year of attendance was 2001, but I may be off by a year or two. We’ve missed a few years since, but we’ve mostly made it. So it’s interesting to compare mental notes, and also to note that there are still ways for the Festival to surprise me. Here are some notes on our experience this year:

::  It used to be that buying tickets online was the quick way to get into the Festival, while everyone else queued up at the ticket booths. You can tell from the photo up top that this is no longer the case! That’s the line for entry, and the ticket booths are off to the side, on the right, out of frame, and nobody’s there. The line moved pretty quickly, though; once we got in line, we were checking in and inside the grounds in about ten minutes. This gave me time to make sure I had my base camera settings good to go and to look around at our fellow fair-goers.

::  They say you’re allowed to bring in an empty water bottle, but there are no actual filling stations; for filling you’re supposed to use the faucets in the privies. The Festival might want to consider actual filling stations. (Plus, nobody checked our bags as we entered. I had on a small over-the-shoulder back bag, and The Wife had her small purse. Nobody looked. We could have absolutely filled our water bottles with ice. I’m noting that for next year.)

::  Food at the Festival has always been cash only, until this year; now it’s card only. This is not a problem, and we knew about it going in. The Festival seems to have spent quite a bit of money improving its online infrastructure, so transactions were generally much easier. Cell service is very spotty at the Sterling Festival, so vendors who used to rely on things like a Squarespace thing for transactions often had to awkwardly wave their phones or tablets around to get the best signal. One year a vendor accidentally tapped my amount in with an extra zero, so I had to go back and get that reversed. This year, there were no such problems and most transactions were painless.

::  But, I did notice some apparently staffing issues along the way. There were some food booths that were no open at all, which had been open in the past. The turkey leg booth, which is very popular, only had one customer-facing worker, so there was a long line there. Also, we noticed a distinct lack of roaming food vendors. The pretzel guy, the pickle lady, the popcorn girl–we saw none of these. The only one I saw all day was the jerky dude. Again, I wonder if there were simply not enough applicants this year.

::  My fit yesterday? As you might expect:

:: “But Kelly!” you might ask. “Isn’t that outfit a bit warm for a July day at a Renaissance Festival that’s built on the side of a hill and therefore involves almost literal hiking to get around?”

Why yes, yes, it is. Now, I’ve found that my relationship with hot weather has changed over the years: I can function in heat now that used to reduce me to a sweat-puddle. And I find that overalls, believe it or not, actual feel cooler to wear than shorts or something similar, because of the lack of a waistband that allows air flow. There’s a reason why civilizations in very hot climes often wear long, flowing clothing that protects from the sun and allows air to flow to deal with the heat.

And in recent years, we’ve been lucky in that while yes, July in Upstate New York is generally warm and humid, our visits to the Sterling Festival haven’t been too bad in that regard. Yesterday, however, saw that lucky streak end. The last weather forecast I saw predicted low-80s and partly-to-cloudy skies. Instead we had upper 80s and full sun most of the day. It was straight-up hot and humid, and in a lot of ways the day was a physical struggle with the heat. Add to this that the Festival owners apparently had a lot of dead trees removed from the grounds, and there were places that were once shaded which now are not, and…yeah. This is just the way the ball bounces, unfortunately. All we can do is hope for a better weather day next year.

I saw someone on social media last week or before opine that no Renaissance Festival should happen outside of fall, and I’d be inclined to agree, except that we already have late summer and early fall pretty well packed with stuff we like to do. It just works out for our calendar that our Renaissance Festival happens in July (and it does go into August, so there’s that).

::  I always love seeing people in their costumes. Some were as amazing as always, and I’ll be sharing some photos of great costume work once I get the day’s photos edited, so look for another post. I note that while the Festival purports to be an Elizabethan-era village called Warwickshire, no one expects costumed revelers to be completely period-authentic. (And the Festival does have a theme weekend where they encourage anachronism and other costume approaches, like steampunk.) But, come on, folks: at least try to stay at least kind of on theme. One guy was wearing a hot-dog costume. Like, the thing someone wears to provide human advertising for the hot dog sale at church or the local minimart. That bugged me, I must admit!

::  When we first started going to the Festival, I noticed that a common thing–and an annoying one, at that–is visitors walking around offering up a constant run of quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Then, a few years alter, quoting The Lord of the Rings was all the rage. Sure, maybe it’s funny the first time, but hearing “You shall not pass!” is a lot less funny the twelfth time. Luckily, I heard no such thing this year. Huzzah!

::  Every year the grounds are populated by a “cast” of regulars who are portraying the actual people of Warwickshire, and they engage in all manner of improvisatory frivolity. It gives the day a particular fun twist, to know that you might happen on an impromptu performance someplace. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t see as much of that this time, either. I wonder if there were staffing issues there, too.

::  The Joust used to be emceed by a guy I always referred to as The Impressive Scotsman, and he hasn’t been there the last few years. He’s an older gent so I chalked it up to retirement; the replacement was fine, but he wasn’t the Impressive Scotsman, though. Imagine by joyous surprise when the Joust began and out rode the Impressive Scotsman! Now featuring an Impressive Beard.

:: During the Joust I noticed a few moments when The Queen was speaking and when the Impressive Scotsman talked over her. I wonder if they were having a bit of struggle in the script department. No problem, though.

::  We watched one performer who noted improvements made to the stage he usually uses: “A couple of years ago I fell through a hole in the stage, and they didn’t fix it. Then two weeks later an audience member came up to greet me after the show and they fell through the hole, and then they fixed it!” As I walked through the Festival grounds I noticed quite a few places where the age of the rustic wooden infrastructure was starting to show the results of accumulated years and elements. Now that the Festival has invested a lot in its electronic infrastructure, I think it may be time to invest in its physical infrastructure. The places really needs carpenters and painters.

::  Finally, it may or may not be known that every year at the Festival we buy new mugs from a certain pottery vendor. Do we need more mugs? Of course not! Do we buy new ones anyway? Of course we do! Here is my mug from this year. I don’t have a photo yet of The Wife’s new mug, but I’ll get on that.

We’ll see you in 2026, Sterling Renaissance Festival! Until then, God save the Queen!

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I’ve been a big fan of roundabouts for years. It’s utterly clear to me that as annoying as it can be to approach one when you’re behind someone who doesn’t know what to do, roundabouts are still much easier to negotiate than a normal four-way stop or light. It’s also clearly established that they are safer and that they move traffic through an intersection much more efficiently than do other forms of traffic management. And yet, on social media, every time roundabouts are mentioned, there will be a chorus of people complaining about how they hate them, they’re stupid, and so on. People do point out more and more frequently that this is simply and objectively false, but it still happens.

A very odd situation exists in the village of Hamburg, which we visit weekly for various reasons (a bakery we like, our favorite farmers market, and others). You see in the image above the Google Earth image of the village. The odd part is that the village has multiple roundabouts governing traffic on its eastern end, which makes that part of town a breeze to get through, and zero roundabouts on its western end, which makes that part of town kind of annoying to drive through. The western end is nothing but traffic lights, most of which are poorly sequenced and longer than they need to be; also, traffic is always heavy enough to make left turns very difficult, with the result that a single person turning left can really gum up the works. Every single week when we drive through Hamburg, I find myself thinking, “When the hell are they going to turn these lighted intersections into roundabouts?!”

I’ll close this with a tour of one roundabout that might test even my pro-roundabout convictions. Next time I’m moving through Swindon in the UK, I might well pay a cabbie to do it for me:

 

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Last weekend The Wife and I enjoyed a three-night getaway to Canada. We hadn’t been to Toronto in way too many years, even before COVID made crossing the border impossible, and we were excited to return. Our plans were all in Toronto, but I learned a valuable lesson as a kid from my parents: when visiting a very large city, it’s best to stay well outside the city and use the public transportation and your feet to get around. Driving around in an unfamiliar city is never a great idea. (The object lesson as a kid was several trips to Boston, which is a uniquely devilish city to try to drive around, but it applies to Toronto as well. We only drove into the city once on this trip, and that was our first night there, because the place we were going isn’t easy to reach via public transport and The Wife is currently experiencing some mobility issues.)

So we crossed the border Friday afternoon and drove to our hotel in Mississauga, which in America would be cheekily called “Toronto’s biggest suburb”, but Mississauga is a huge city in its own right, with a population almost three times that of Buffalo. It always feels like something of a mental re-calibration of my concept of a “city”, whenever we go to a significantly larger (and more healthily urban) place than Buffalo. There are clusters of residential towers all over the entire greater Toronto region that dwarf the entirety of Buffalo’s skyline, and with that many people and a robust public transport system*, it must be nice to be able to see news of something new being built and not see all the comments in the replies to the effect of, “But where will we park?” (Seriously, any time anything is announced in downtown Buffalo, the questions of parking come up, because nobody in this region has any idea what a healthy and dense city is supposed to be like, in terms of parking and driving. People here glaze over at the very thought that you’re not actually supposed to always be able to park within fifty feet of the front door of wherever it is you’re going.)

Our hotel was very near Toronto’s Pearson Airport, and our windows faced south, giving us a nifty view of both downtown Mississauga to the west:

And downtown Toronto to the east.

Our hotel had no free breakfast (you could pay for a buffet, but these are always dicey in terms of gluten), so we made the Starbucks across the street our first stop each morning.

On the first full day there, we drove to the GO Station to catch the train into Toronto’s Union Station, which is the city’s major transportation hub, at the very foot of the financial district. We enjoyed the GO Trains, which are clean and comfortable.

What we didn’t enjoy quite as much was navigating Union Station, which is quite the complicated warren of tunnels and passages. Toronto’s downtown core–the area in the Financial District and some points immediately surrounding–is all connected underground through a system of tunnels called PATH, and it has all developed over the years to the point where it’s basically a giant subterranean shopping mall beneath the city. The problem is that it is highly confusing, with signage that isn’t entirely clear. We got lost twice down there in one day! Not badly lost, mind you–it’s not like we were suddenly six blocks off our intended location–but we did have to do some backtracking to figure out just where we were in relation to where we wanted to be, and that was annoying (particularly when The Wife is having a hard time getting around). Add to that the fact that apparently nothing in the PATH “mall” is open on weekends, and the whole atmosphere was like walking through a sterile, closed environment. And that’s not the reason we go to dense, vibrant cities! If I want to walk through a deserted mall, I can go to the dying mall ten minutes from our house.

Union Station is quite beautiful, though:

Another contrast with Buffalo, I suppose: Toronto actually uses its grand train station as a train station. Buffalo has a big gorgeous train station, but refuses to use it as such. Anyway, our initial destination on Full Day One was the St. Lawrence Market. This is a big public market that is a major food destination. Think of the Pike Place Market in Seattle…or Buffalo’s Broadway Market, but, well, consistently packed and successful.

The very first thing we did when we entered the Market was to buy a couple of coffees, since (a) it was cold and drizzly out and we needed the warmth, and (b) we were hit by the smell of the coffee the second we opened the outer doors. This particular coffee place is tiny–your house probably has at least one bathroom that’s larger than this place–but it was packed as tightly as possible, spilling out onto shelves outside the location proper, with coffee beans and coffee supplies and also tea and tea pots and whatnot. The joint is run by an elderly Asian couple, and the coffee was wonderful. We ended up coming back to buy some whole-bean coffee (“Maple Cream” flavored, if you’re wondering).

(By the way, on the topic of coffee: you know what we saw far fewer of than we’d expected, given that we were in Canada? Tim Hortons locations! They exist, but they do not seem to have the “Tim’s on every corner” thing going on that Buffalo has. We even saw a closed Tim Hortons! Like, an empty storefront with the signage removed but you could still make out the logo from the pattern of dirt on the terra cotta!)

Since The Wife is celiac, we had to get a little creative for lunch, since the many sandwich joints and pasta joints and whatever else were pretty much out of the running. We ended up getting a chunk of cheese and some cured meat sticks from a cheesemonger, which was lovely anyway. Dietary restrictions certainly do lend an investigative air to finding food in unfamiliar locales; you can’t just say, “Ooooh, that looks good, let’s eat there!” In addition to the cheesemonger (there are several of these in the Market), we also found a stall in the basement making crepes, and they had a gluten-free crepe available, so we got one to share (apple and cheese-filled, if you’re wondering).

We’ve found a liking for crepes in recent years, partly because we discovered a lovely restaurant near Rochester that has gluten-free crepes.

I generally try not to partake of gluten-filled goodies in front of The Wife, because that’s mean, but I did have to give in at this patisserie:

I mean, look at that stuff. I got a single Coconut Rum Ball.

I ate it on the spot, and it was good, and I regret NOTHING.

After we were done at the Market, we walked back the way we had come, heading for Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada. On the way we came to Toronto’s Flatiron Building, which is appropriately pointy on one end, and flat on the other, with one of the niftier murals around:

Just beyond the Flatiron Building is a lovely park with a fountain of fantastic whimsy:

The fountain’s jets are all dogs!

Note that one figurine is a cat, who is totally ignoring what all the dogs are focused on…

…and note that at the top of the fountain, drawing the attention of all those spouting dogs, is a bone! The fountain wasn’t running, unfortunately–it’s probably too early in the season for such things yet–but here’s a bit of info on the fountain, which we found utterly delightful. (Apparently the cat is staring at a couple of bird statues, which we didn’t realize at the time.)

The walk from the Market to the Aquarium was longer than we would have liked, owing to The Wife’s difficulties; in normal times it would have been fine, but I did find myself wondering why Toronto has no streetcar line running between the St. Lawrence Market area and the CN Tower area (the Aquarium is literally right next to the CN Tower; I took that photo at the top of this post from the Aquarium’s walkway, very near the front door).

As for the Aquarium itself? It’s a fantastic facility, full of exactly the kind of exhibits you expect at any fine aquarium. Since Toronto is a Great Lakes city (by population, it’s the largest city on the Great Lakes!), there are a lot of displays of Great Lakes habitats, but they also have large tropical fish displays, too. The Aquarium’s main event is a huge tank , mimicking a tropical reef, through which visitors can walk (or ride, via moving walkway) via a submerged tunnel that’s surprisingly long, and this is all suitably amazing. We do wish we’d attended to Aquarium on a school day, though–the place was loaded with kids and their often beleaguered parents. A few thoughts here:

::  Look, aquariums are awesome places to take your kids. I get it. I loved those places as a kid myself. But prepare yourselves, wouldja?

::  That said, your one-year-old baby is not going to remember any of this, so maybe spend a bit less time hogging the space right in front of a particular tank or exhibit because you’re trying to get that perfect photo of your baby in front of a shark or ray or eel or whatever. It’s obnoxious.

::  And ferchrissakes, please brush your kid up on the concept of personal space. Because if your kid reaches forward and touches the guy in the overalls in front of you, repeatedly, eventually that guy might well turn around and give your kid an impromptu lesson in how to incorporate the F-word into the sentence Keep your hands to yourself and do NOT touch me again!

::  You may wonder, at some point in your aquarium experience (any aquarium, not just the Toronto one), if Finding Nemo has been out long enough that kids won’t lose their shit and start shouting “DORY!!!” the second the spot a Pacific blue tang. The answer? No, it has not. Be warned. (Oddly, they don’t get nearly as excited about clownfish.)

::  They should keep human-sized lobster traps on hand, in which to lock people for one hour any time they start singing “Baby Shark”. In fact, this rule should exist outside aquariums, too.

All this sounds bitchy and whiny, I concede, but Ye Gods, folks. It’s an Aquarium, not an amusement park.

But still…what an aquarium it is!

The jellyfish displays were surreal. The blue water was so blue and featureless that it actually felt like an extremely high-resolution video display.

Yes, I know, there are a couple of “Dory” fish in there. Squeal to your heart’s content, folks!

Apologies for this…they have a dark tunnel where the only light is simulated “rippling light on the ocean floor” and I wanted a selfie in that light, not realizing it would make me look like the person waiting in the dark to murder you.

I mean, in normal light, I actually quite like the look I had going on that day!

I continue to wish I’d discovered the “Renfest shirt with overalls” combo earlier in life, as I do think it’s pretty much my definitive look at this point.

(Also, the entire time we were in one of North America’s biggest cities, I saw exactly one other person wearing overalls, and that was an Asian guy on the streetcar in Chinatown. And I only saw two people wearing the “Canadian Tuxedo” look, so…what gives, Toronto!)

After we left the Aquarium we struck out again back for Union Station (the same walk as before, sigh, only I have found that a long walk often feels a bit shorter the second time because you know how long it is, if that makes any sense). This time we hopped aboard the subway, heading north up Yonge Street to a gluten-free Chinese restaurant we had read about online. This trek also turned into a thing, because the subway is actually closed beyond a station that is three stations shy of where we were going. Luckily Toronto is running shuttle buses to the remaining stations, but the going is a lot slower as now you’re at the mercy of street traffic…and the station where we were getting off was six or seven blocks south of the restaurant’s location, as noted by Google Maps. (Hold onto that last point.)

So off the bus we went and we started walking up Yonge Street. Yonge is one of Toronto’s major north-south streets; in fact, at one point it was held to be the “longest street in the world”, as the way it was formerly rendered on maps it literally went north all the way around all of the Great Lakes’ north shores, terminating near Minnesota! That’s not the case now, but Yonge is still very long, and walk we did, and walked, and walked. Which by this time was quite hard on The Wife. This is unfortunate, because quite honestly, I wouldn’t mind someday taking a day in Toronto in which I go up quite far on Yonge and walk all the way back down to Union Station. There’s so much fascinating stuff along Yonge as you go from neighborhood to neighborhood.

And, for all you Bill and Ted fans, strange things are afoot on Yonge, as well!

But finally we reached the address where Google said our restaurant was located.

Guess what.

Not there.

I remembered then that the restaurant had announced on social media several months before that they were moving to a new location on Yonge, which was another four blocks north…but Google Maps had not updated. So walk more, we did.

By this point my poor wife was suffering.

But we got to the restaurant. It’s called Riz, and we had a lovely time here.

We didn’t actually order meals here. The appetizer menu looked so good that we just ended up kind of replicating a dim sum meal by ordering a bunch of apps, along with a couple of cocktails. I felt a little bit bad about this, because the person who sat us at our table made an impressive pitch about their Peking Duck Dinner for Two. I think he really wanted us to try the duck. We were a bit gunshy about that, neither of us ever having actually had Peking Duck. (In fact, I don’t actually know that I’ve ever eaten duck, “Peking” or otherwise.)

Once we finished eating, we struck out again, heading back south down Yonge to the bus stop. Unfortunately the restaurant is almost exactly in between two subway stops, so it wouldn’t have saved us anything to walk north to the next one. (What I should have done was find a bus stop and then take the bus to the subway station, instead of walking all the way back to catch the buses that were only doing shuttle runs between subway stations. Again, when you’re not in a city with a robust public transport system, you don’t end up taking advantage of the one you’re visiting to best effect. Live and learn. We’ll be back.)

The day ended with our staggering back through Union Station to board the GO Train back to our car, half an hour away in Mississauga, so we could rest and recuperate for Day Two.

And that will be another post. Day Two went better, transportation-wise, than Day One did, because I made some adjustments…but Google Maps did us dirty again! How? Stay tuned!

 

* I don’t know a whole lot about the particulars, but I know that the Ontario government, currently run by Canada’s conservatives, has not been particularly supportive of public transport and that apparently the system has suffered as a result. We did not notice any problems, save one time when a station along the subway line we were riding had to be closed due to a violent incident. This did not inconvenience us, as we were not stopping at that particular station, but it did cause some consternation to other passengers near us.

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