3 Apr 09

17:19 EST

So we got up this morning, grabbed a bagel from a nearby coffee shop and headed straight to the Hockey Hall of Fame, luckily they stamp your hand so that you can come and go as we still weren't finished by lunchtime. I will leave most of the explanation to S but my highlights were watching him try and score some goals, mixing my own tv coverage and seeing the Stanley Cup. The one thing i did not like was a film on the Stanley Cup which had the worst voice overs ever.

So Steve's highlights of the Hockey Hall of Fame...this was really the point of the whole trip to Toronto as far as I was concerned (apart from maybe Niagara). The main exhibitions were all about the records that have been posted by individual players and teams and the history behind them. One striking thing about the records was that the same man still holds the record for the most number of goals, assists and total points scored over his entire career - Wayne Gretzky, quite possibly the most famous man in Hockey, and for good reason it seems.

Other highlights included getting a chance to shoot some pucks and try out being a goalie against computers, as well as getting up close and personal with Lord Stanley's Cup which is every bit as impressive as it looks, and has the name of every player who has ever been on the Cup winning team, although they have "retired" some of the cup as it was getting ridiculously big!! We also spent quite a bit of time in the shop afterwards looking at all the memorabilia and deciding to pick up a couple of t-shirts and a baseball cap for me!


At about 12 we headed blinking out into the sunshine to get some lunch (we were about half way through by that point) so we headed to a restaurant/cafe in the same mall as the hall of fame. A lot of Toronto takes place in similar malls or even underground which isn't particularly easy to navigate but given the absolutley horrendous weather today it is a god send. The Restaurant was actually a cooked food market place where you get given a special card when you enter and you can choose your food from a number of different stalls, we chose to share a rotisserie chicken with veg and a pepperoni calzone with a fruit tart for S and a Napoleon cream tart for M.

We then headed back to the hall of fame, finished off the exhibitions and took in the Stanley Cup before heading to the shop.

We then got the subway to the Royal Museum of Ontario which was really good indeed. We did the gemstones exhibitions, Dinosaurs, Bat Cave, Egyptians and Greeks.

We then headed back on the Subway and are now drying off a bit before completing the Hockey day by heading to Wayne Gretzkys Restaurant.