This year’s Labour Day Weekend was a busy one. It was also hot. Very hot. We moved our 19 year old back to Sudbury, Ontario for his second year at Laurentian University. He’s off-campus this year and has a unique apartment that is on the edge of a deep cut in the Canadian Shield, housing a pair of railroad tracks.
After our Sudbury odyssey, it was off in the opposite direction to watch the Canadian International Air Show from the 29th floor of a condo in downtown Toronto. Along the way, we got a surprise beauty moment at the head of the Seguin Trail and did a bit of plane spotting at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
It’s cheezy but it’s still pretty cool some 50+ years after it was created. The Big Nickel in Sudbury is 30 feet high and two feet thick. It’s been around since 1964 as is adjacent to Dynamic Earth, an attraction that takes you beneath the earth into some old mine shafts.
In the background is the ever-present Inco Superstack. At 1,250 feet, this is the tallest chimney in North America and is the second tallest free standing structure in the country, behind the CN Tower.
It was training camp / tryout time for the Sudbury Wolves of the Ontario Hockey League. We missed a pre-season scrimmage but did get inside the Sudbury Community Arena. This venue opened way back in 1951 and has a capacity for 5,100 hockey fans.
The numbers hanging from the rafters are retired for hockey greats Ron Duguay, Mike Foligno, Dale Hunter and Randy Carlyle. The franchise began as the Barrie Flyers for the 1945-46 season. By way of Niagara Falls, the Sudbury Wolves began play for the 1972-73 season. To date, the club has not won an OHL championship.
Above is the view from the backyard of my son’s apartment. Directly behind the house, there is a deep cut into the Canadian Shield to house these twin tracks. The image is looking west, towards town, with a glimpse of Ramsey Lake where the tracks curve.
Just south of Parry Sound, on highway 400, there is a rest stop / information centre that anyone who has ever travelled the highway has surely stopped at. We stopped in on our way back home and had the luck of arriving with the sun setting in clear skies to the west and thunderstorms to the east. The result was some pretty cool colours for a very short period of time.
The water is an off-shoot of Brennan Lake which is located on the edge of the Seguin Trail. This trail starts at the info centre and runs 75 km along an abandoned Grand Trunk Railway rail bed until it reaches highway 11. This is a major portion of much bigger trail, the Park to Park Trail. That path runs from Algonquin Provincial Park to Killbear Provincial Park and is some 230 km long.
Then Sunday came…
We had the privilege of being invited to spend the afternoon on the 29th floor of a condo building just north of the exhibition grounds in Toronto. The views of the city and the Canadian International Air Show were astounding. The air show has run since 1946 and has been part of the Canadian National Exhibition since 1949.
Of course, there was much more to the show than the Snowbirds but it was the feature. Since 1971, this ground of highly trained pilots has been based out of CFB Moose Jaw. Officially known as the Canadian Forces 431 Air Demonstration Squadron, the Snowbirds fly CT-114 Tutors built in Canada by Canadair (Bombardier Aerospace). Accidents over the years have led to seven pilot deaths among this group.
The above is all nine Snowbirds over Lake Ontario. Below, seven of the jets go into a steep dive over the lake.
It’s the obligatory shot that everyone with a camera wants to get at the Canadian International Air Show – the Snowbirds flying past the CN Tower. If you click on the below image for a larger view, you’ll see some people really getting a good view of the show. The folks dressed in orange and standing on the outside of the observation deck have paid the money for the CN Tower’s EdgeWalk experience.
Toronto. Great place to visit but would you want to live there? One thing for certain is that even when the CN Tower is out of the picture, downtown Toronto still offers one of the world’s greatest skylines. Another thing that is certain, which puts the big city head and shoulders over living in a small town, is that Toronto is vibrant, not just while the sun is up but 24 hours per day.
How do you follow up an air show? Well, in my family you stop by the airport on the way home for a little plane spotting.
There were many more planes taking off than landing when we arrived at our favourite spot on Airport Road in Mississauga. Below are a few of the planes that were coming in.
The first is a Boeing 777-300er belonging to Air Canada (C-FIUR). This wide body was coming in from Toyko, Japan and landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ).
Below is an Airbus A321, also belonging to Air Canada. This one was a domestic flight, inbound from Vancouver, British Columbia.
