Toronto - Day 3

Tuesday morning

Around 20 of our Nobles began the morning walking up the parade route to the staging grounds for the Imperial Parade. On the way over the Queen's motorcade passed right by and her majesty waved to us, probably wonndering who the people were with the funny red hats. All the parade units and participants gathered a very nice shaded park called Queen's Park and socialized for a couple of hours. We were within a 100 feet of 5 huge howitzer artillery guns that were being manned by the Canadian military, and when the Queen was leaving, they gave her a 21 gun salute. If you have never witnessed one of these guns fire, it was amazing. I was very impressed by the regimental nature of the soldiers manning the guns and ammunition. The sound and smoke after each individual shot was a sight to see.

On to the parade, it is traditional the "home" Shrine Temple kicks off the parade. Boy, did they kick off the parade, Rameses Shriners (Toronto) had what appeared to be a never ending line up of parade units, it was actually a full hour until the rest of the temples kicked off. When we finally stepped off, it was truly inspiring to see all the people on University avenue and walking down a street lined by sky scrapers. We had our banner leading us and placed our Imperial Ambassador in the middle of our contingency. He received more applause than anyone, he is very well known, ha, ha.

Near the end of the parade, our Highlanders joined us after marching en masse with a large contingency of pipers and drummers at the front of the parade. They played us through and did a wonderful job.

We all retired to the hospitality room for a well deserved refreshment, did I mention that this was the hottest day of the year for Toronto (one of the reasons for the city wide black out the previous evening).

Through our hospitality room we had a bird's eye view of the remaining parade, and it lasted well past 4 hours.

The main contingency of Moslem attended a special concert led by The Letterman. Carrie and I decided to forgo the concert and we took a cab to Little Italy and dined a wonderful little bistro. I had a delicious venison chop with an italian fig demiglaze (my mouth is still watering from the thought of that meal). We walked around a little, had some ice cream and headed back to the hotel.

The Highlanders were getting ready for their Pub Crawl, and were in the room with some fellow Higlanders from Chicago. Before they took off they asked Carrie and I to join them in the lobby and once again, along with the Chicago crew, played for about 20 minutes. It was great to see everyone come out of every room, restaurant, outside to watch them perform.

Both Carrie and I were tired and from all that walking I really needed to rest my legs, so around 11:30 we hit the hay.

Wednesday morning, the skyline looks beautiful as I write this and we are getting ready to visit Casa Loma, before going to the Convention center this afternoon for the Public Relations Seminar, and then it is off to see the Blue Jays destroy the Minnesota Twins, to help our beloved Tigers stay in first.

Great town, Great times. I Love being a Shriner