Susan Solo – Photographer | Traveler | Adventurer

Tag: Harry Potter

The Lockhart: A Bar for Wizards and Muggles Alike

As any dedicated Harry Potter fan would, I felt it necessary to thoroughly investigate a new establishment in Toronto that has recently been all abuzz as a Harry Potter-themed bar. Chris and I were going to be in Toronto anyway, so when I heard about The Lockhart it was an easier decision to pop by than the Sorting Hat deciding to put Draco into Slytherin.

The Lockhart has received quite a bit of press worldwide and at only a month after they opened their doors the bar has a huge following. We actually almost passed on visiting because several reviewers complained about the long wait to get into the bar, and a few people reported that they weren’t even able to get in after an hour or longer. We decided to give it a try right at opening time, so we showed up in West End at 4:50pm on a Sunday and waited for the doors to open at 5pm. Chris and I were first to get there, but not even a minute after we arrived a dozen people showed up to wait with us. After we were inside and seated, the line outside continued to grow.

The nods to the Potter world are subtle, and I loved that. The Lockhart isn’t straight-up Harry Potter-themed, but it does look like it would fit right into Diagon Alley as one of the pubs where wizards and witches might congregate over an elixir. Easter egg drink titles on the menu will entertain hardcore Harry groupies (and one is said to be so obscure that you’ll earn a free drink if you guess the meaning), but muggles would be none the wiser. Other subtle nuggets from the wizarding world such as the stag logo or the “all was well” neon sign could mean anything to those unfamiliar with Harry Potter, so it makes for a fairly neutral spot catering to fanatics and non-fans alike. A few of the drink titles are reserved for Star Trek or Dr. Who fans, but again, subtly so. The only thing not-so-subtle in the bar was me with my camera, geeking out over the photo ops.

I’m a fan of specialty craft cocktails, and The Lockhart’s menu didn’t disappoint. Chris tried the Big Bad Wolf with bacon-infused bourbon, The Beach House (yum), and we split the Befuddlement Draft, served in a crystal ice bucket with two goblets and a ladle. It’s both a shared cocktail and a fun potions class experiment complete with exciting pyrotechnics. The Befuddlement Draft requires a trip to your Gringotts vault at $32 each, but it’s worth the experience to ooo-and-ahh over it one time and then move onto something else like The Shacklebolt.

For a few directly related Harry Potter references, be sure to visit the loo where you’ll find out that the chamber of secrets is indeed open. You can also search the whole bar for a hidden Deathly Hallows symbol. I found it, but I don’t want to spoil the fun for anyone who wants to discover it for themselves. Let me know if you’re itching to hear where it’s located.

So whether you’re a Potterhead or someone who appreciates creative cocktails, The Lockhart has something for everyone. The tapas menu will tide you over if you’re in need of some snacks – we thoroughly enjoyed the Deep Fried Jalapeño Mac & Cheese Sliders. The staff were all Hufflepuff-level dedicated, friendly, and seemed genuinely excited to be there.

I don’t know if it’s worth a trip to Toronto only for the sake of stopping by The Lockhart, but it’s absolutely worth your time if you plan to be in the area. I’m glad we went! Try hitting the bar when the doors open to avoid the line, or be prepared to wait a bit for a spot in this cozy pub. And brush up on your HP knowledge so you can figure out that obscure reference to earn a free drink!

October 14, 2015
36-ish Hours in Toronto

(Note: I’m interrupting my Ireland/Scotland coverage for a moment to post about our weekend in Toronto. I’ll return with another Ireland post shortly, and then I’ll finally move onto the Scotland photos and stories!)

Sometime a while ago, I decided perhaps a bit arbitrarily that an eight-hour car ride is my one-day road-tripping threshold. Four hours before lunch, four hours after, and that still leaves an evening in the destination city. So when Chris and I were deciding on where to road trip on a long weekend (Columbus Day), I looked at the map and figured out where we could drive within eight hours. Chris had been wanting to go to the Hockey Hall of Fame, and I pretty much just wanted to go anywhere, so lo and behold we headed to Toronto!

We actually ended up leaving after work on a Friday evening so that we could get a few hours behind us and have a good bit of Saturday in Canada. After an overnight stop in Du Bois, Pennsylvania (pronounced “doo-BOYS” and not “doo-BWAH” as one might think if one studied French for five years), we followed the changing foliage up through the rest of PA and New York.

Since Niagara Falls was on the way and neither of us had ever been there, we planned to stop by for a bit to take photos pending good weather. As luck would have it, the weather cooperated and we were even treated to a rainbow!

We stopped at Horseshoe Falls on the Canada side after parking near the Table Rock welcome center. I couldn’t believe how crowded the whole park was, although it was Saturday on a holiday weekend so maybe that’s a big “duh” on my part. We hadn’t planned to stay long and didn’t have a strong desire to do any of the falls-related activities. That said, Niagara Falls is a spot where you can spend as little or as much time as you want. It looks like a lot of people make a day or several days out of it, but we were happy to take pictures, look through the gift shop, and be on our merry way. I would have loved to see the falls from a helicopter, but the view from the ground is pretty spectacular, too.

After leaving Niagara, we ended up getting to our Airbnb condo in Toronto around 5:30pm, leaving us enough time to settle in, explore a little bit, and to grab dinner/drinks in the city. Let our almost-a-day-and-a-half in Toronto begin!

The weekend was evenly divided between Chris’s picks and my picks for things to see, do, and eat. To go along with Chris’s Hockey Hall of Fame theme, we ate at Wayne Gretsky’s on Saturday night and perused some hockey memorabilia.

We considered going up to the top of the CN Tower to check out the views, but we opted to give it a miss this trip since we were limited on time and didn’t want to spend it in a queue. As one of Toronto’s top attractions, I read that the tower often requires quite a long wait in line to ascend and to descend, especially on holidays and weekends. Next time!

On Sunday morning, we walked over to the Hockey Hall of Fame when it opened (10:30am on Sundays). We spent a little under two hours touring the museum plus the gift shop, and found that it was starting to get busy as we were leaving, so getting there at opening hour was a good call.

Of course, we looked for Washington Capitals artifacts wherever we could find them. Go Caps!

The museum features plenty of interactive opportunities for kids and kids at heart. You can try your hand at shooting the puck in a life-size computerized game, play a round of bubble hockey, or compete against another player in NHL ’15 for PlayStation. We also watched a hockey-related 3D movie that I thought was a smidge on the cheesy side, but still good fun.

Perhaps one of the biggest highlights of the museum is of course seeing the Stanley Cup. We didn’t hop up there with the trophy (I only snapped the photo below), but a photographer is on-hand to take a professional souvenir photo of each guest with the cup, and then the image is for sale in the gift shop.

Onto one of my picks, we headed over to the Dundas West neighborhood downtown to check out a new bar I heard about all the way down here in Virginia. The Lockhart, an otherwise unassuming and cozy little bar, is receiving quite a bit of press worldwide for being a “Harry Potter-themed bar.” I’m going to give The Lockhart its own post so stay tuned for that, but here are a few photos from our visit.

And as my other pick, I’m a total sucker for a good aquarium, so after a delicious dinner at Taverna we headed across the street to Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada for a sea creatures fix. I expected the aquarium to be more on the quiet side since we visited well past peak hours, but at 8pm it was still hopping. Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada, so I assume that might have attributed to what would have otherwise been a quiet Sunday evening. Nevertheless, we enjoyed exploring the various tanks and features, especially the Dangerous Lagoon with the longest moving sidewalk in North America.

To finish off our quick jaunt to Canada, we ended on a sweet note Monday morning with a cinnamon roll and an apple fritter at Tim Hortons. The sugar rush gave us a much needed energy boost for the 8.5-hour ride home.

So that was Toronto! It was a pretty easy drive from the Washington, D.C. area, so I’m keeping it on my list as somewhere we need to revisit in order to see a bit more of the city. Let me know if you have any favorite spots that we need to check out next time!

October 13, 2015
Welcome to Diagon Alley

Calling all Harry Potter fans! Chris and I spent our long Columbus Day weekend on a quick jaunt to Florida to visit Universal Studios, and I can now confirm that the newest additions are awesome. Ever since Diagon Alley opened in July, I’ve been dying to see the new section of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I had such a great time last year with Casey when we geeked out in Hogsmeade, and I couldn’t wait to see what else was added to the park.

We arrived at Universal Studios first thing on Sunday morning, and went straight to the Wizarding World. Up until this weekend, I managed to avoid most articles and photos of the new stuff so that I’d be thoroughly surprised. I was actually so in-the-dark about everything that I didn’t even know how to get to Diagon Alley from the London area! (The entrance is tucked into the red building in the photo below and you come out through an opening in a brick wall, of course.)

We made a beeline straight for the Escape from Gringotts ride, but sadly it was (temporarily) nonoperational and they had closed the ride. Not even an alohomora spell could get us into the bank. Womp womp. So the next thing on my must-do list was to drink a frozen Butterbeer and to see how Chris liked it (he loved it, too). It’s totally fine to drink it for breakfast, right? Especially on such a hot day – the day’s high promised to be over 90 and it felt like we were already there by 10am!

After recovering from our Butterbeer brain-freezes, we wandered around a bit to see the amazing details of the buildings. And of course Diagon Alley has all of the shops that you would expect to see – some of them are functional and some of the storefronts are just for decoration, but they’re all fun to inspect and explore. Lots of spots around Diagon Alley also interact with the new wands from Ollivanders! (I didn’t purchase a wand only because I didn’t want to carry it around all day and stow it in lockers when we went on the rides, but we enjoyed watching other people perform spells at the marked locations. Here’s a great review of the interactive wands.) I especially loved wandering down the dark and mysterious Knockturn Alley. Once your eyes adjust, you’ll get to see all kinds of wonderfully creepy things including Borgin and Burkes.

We checked one more time to see if Escape from Gringotts was up-and-running yet, but it was not, so we left Diagon Alley to ride the Hogwarts Express over to Hogsmeade in Islands of Adventure. Wouldn’t you know it, the train was also on the fritz! Had someone put a hex on all of the new rides?! Argh! I was bummed, but not defeated – we decided to just wait for another ride nearby. After we waited in the queue for The Mummy and finished the ride, we heard that Gringotts was ready! And it was worth the wait – I think walking through the elaborately designed bank was just as fun as the ride itself. One of the goblins looked up and glared right at me.

Our wait for Gringotts was over an hour – have I not mentioned yet how super incredibly crowded it was at the park that day?! Universal does such a good job though of making sure your time in queue is interesting (and air-conditioned) and therefore not too painful if you are in a lengthy line. We had a long wait for the Hogwarts Express as well, which was functioning again shortly after we ate lunch. Note: make sure you purchase park-to-park admission between Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure or else you won’t be able to ride the train! If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you’ll want to see both parks anyway (smart on Universal’s part, eh?) so go ahead and get a park-to-park ticket. And while we’re talking about tickets, I’ll mention that both this time and last time I was at Universal Studios, we bought two-day passes so that we’d have plenty of time to see and do everything with some flexibility for bad weather. It really depends on the crowd levels and your own interests as to whether or not you can cover both parks in one day.

You really do walk through the brick wall between platforms 9 and 10! I meant to have Chris take a photo of me walking through, but I forgot! Not that I wanted ~~many~~ any pictures of myself that day – I was a hot, sweaty mess so there is literally not one photo of us at the park. Oops!

The journey on the train was really cute and authentic. Once we arrived in Hogsmeade, Chris and I rode the Dragon Challenge and the Forbidden Journey (a favorite), and we actually lucked out with short lines on those two. On the Forbidden Journey, we decided to go through the single-rider line and figured we could just meet at the ride exit afterwards, but we ended up being put on the same car anyway, so we saved 40 minutes and we rode together – bonus!

Despite the crazy hot temperature, massive crowds, and broken rides, we had a fun time and I’m really glad I had the chance to see the new parts of the park. If I had a do-over of the trip though, I’d pick a cooler month weather-wise and not a holiday weekend. For more photos of the Hogsmeade side of the Wizarding World, check out my post from last year’s visit. I just wish we could have brought home one last Butterbeer!

October 20, 2014
Photo Friday – Balmy and Palmy

Last weekend, Chris and I took a quick trip to Florida so that I could see the new additions to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter within the Universal Studios theme park. I feel like we picked the hottest weekend of the year, and I was surprised that it was so warm in October! I thought it would be a little milder, but we had very sunny days all weekend with temperatures over 90 degrees. This photo was taken on our walk from the hotel to the park on a cloudless Sunday morning. (That’s not a dust speck toward the bottom – that’s the moon!) More photos from our Universal adventure soon!

October 17, 2014
England 2003

As promised, I’ve finally gotten around to scanning a few film prints from my travels to England in 2003! This trip was incredibly special for so many reasons. It was my first time going anywhere in Europe, and I was visiting my parents who had moved to Lytham St Annes (near Blackpool) for my mom’s job. They were both excellent hosts, and made touring the country really fun and easy. The trip didn’t start out easy though – the day before I was scheduled to leave, I received notice that my flight was cancelled due to incoming Hurricane Isabel. I called the airline to ask about my options, and they informed me that they had one seat available on that evening’s flight and that it was mine if I wanted it! Great! Only…the flight was leaving in just under three hours. Oh, and I was at work, in Rockville, Maryland, which is at least a 45-minute drive from where I was living at the time. AND I hadn’t packed yet! So if you do the math, three hours minus the commute time, minus the required be-at-the-airport-two-hours-before-your-international-flight time, that left me less than 15 minutes to pack a suitcase for a week abroad. What I didn’t account for was how crazy the security lines would be at Dulles International Airport since everyone else had the same plan to get out of ~~Dodge~~ Virginia before the hurricane hit. Somehow I managed to throw a bag together and get a taxi to the airport in time, and thanks to the kindness of strangers who let me jump to the head of the security line, I just barely made my flight! And thanks certainly also go to my super sweet co-workers at the time who encouraged me to drop everything, covered the remainder of the day’s responsibilities for me, and allowed me to go, go, go. I’ll never forget how crazy that day was – that is not my preferred method of travel (I’m an obsessive planner), but it’s nice to know I can be super spontaneous, too!

Once I arrived in England, my parents ensured that I saw an amazing sampling of the entire country. My mom and I took a fantastic side-trip via train to London for a few days where we saw just about every major must-see including Mamma Mia at Prince Edwards Theatre, my dad drove me all over the beautiful countryside to various castles and towns during the week, and we all took an overnight trip to Newcastle upon Tyne and went up to see Alnwick Castle, where parts of the first two Harry Potter movies were filmed! We even drove across the border into Scotland, so technically I’ve been there, too. (Chris and I are actually planning a proper visit to Scotland next year.) There’s still more I’d like to see in England so I’ll definitely go again someday, but I’m grateful I was able to see so much during this visit.

Note: there aren’t many people-photos on this trip! At the time, I was really just into photographing scenery and details. I did snap a photo of my dad at Alnwick and I wish I had taken more photos of my parents and I together. I guess we’ll all just have to go back! Also, I used to be into scrapbooking and several of my photos ended up sliced-and-diced for the scrapbook pages, so I included a scan of my London two-page spread just for fun.

April 3, 2014