Susan Solo – Photographer | Traveler | Adventurer

Tag: Pennsylvania

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
Deep Thoughts on Snowboarding vs. Skiing

Hope everyone is still staying all warm and cozy through this long winter! Chris and I just returned from a quick trip to Seven Springs in Pennsylvania where we broke in our new skis and enjoyed playing on the snow. We decided to go during the week rather than on a weekend so that we could practice skiing with fewer people on the trails. Hardly anyone was at the resort, and we really did have the place pretty much to ourselves so we felt like that was a good call! The drive up was so beautiful, and the mountain was also really lovely. We stayed at a cute condo with ski-in/ski-out access, and were able to get in lots of practice.

So now that I’ve skied a few times after spending the last two seasons learning how to snowboard, I think I can say with confidence that skiing is much (much much) easier to learn. I have fallen maybe 4-5 times total so far while learning on skis, whereas with snowboarding I fell at least 4-5 times per run in the learning stages. Ow. And that’s not counting falling when getting off the lift, which was at least half of the time. Oh, the bruises and aches I collected while learning! It took me at least five separate trips to various resorts to get the hang of snowboarding (meaning, linking smooth turns all the way down without falling), but with skiing I was able to successfully make it down the green runs on my first try. I’m not really counting the first time I ever skied when I was sixteen, although I was able to ski down the greens back then, too.

I’ve read that snowboarding is harder to learn but easy to master, and that skiing is easy to learn but hard to master. I wouldn’t say I mastered snowboarding, but I did become proficient enough and I can agree with that statement – skiing is waaay easier to learn. But I can see how it’s going to take some more time to improve my skiing techniques, and I imagine the patience comes into play during the intermediate level. So if you’re new to snow sports and trying to decide what to try, maybe that will help. If you enjoy a challenge and have the patience to stick with it, try snowboarding! If you’d rather have an easier time with just getting down the mountain on your first day, maybe skiing is a good option. Or you can always choose to try both so you’ll know for sure which one you like better. I’m planning to put more time into skiing next season to work on technique.

Here are just a couple of photos from Seven Springs. I meant to take more, but the one thing that is harder on skis is taking photos! It’s hard to hold both poles and a camera. 🙂

February 27, 2014
Shredding the Gnar

It was (almost) around this time last year that I started to learn how to snowboard! It’s something Chris had tried a few times before and he wanted to get back into it, so I thought I’d give it a try so it could be something we could enjoy together. Though I admit I was pretty scared to try it – having both of your feet stuck to one board that you can’t easily detach (like skis) while barreling down a slope seemed like a bad idea to me.

The first time I went was in Colorado where we signed up for a private lesson with one of the instructors at Eldora Mountain Resort. I was warned ahead of time that the learning curve is quite steep, and that’s an understatement! But I was immediately* in love with it, despite also being so frustrated with how HARD it is. I think it took me about five snowboarding trips and many many bruises before I really “got it.”

*Edited to add: Chris just reminded me that I wasn’t quite immediately in love with it. I was pretty flustered with the first few hours of the lesson. Our instructor had us practicing on a small hill, where we’d ride down and then climb back up with the heavy board strapped to one foot. It’s probably the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done! So actually, I think I said, “I hate this,” when we were on break.

Our instructor, Amir, was awesome. He was patient and really focused on the basics and a good foundation. He pushed me to challenge myself, but not too far past what I was comfortable with, alhough I did take a hard fall at the end of the day when he let me go down the bottom of the trail by myself. I’ll never forget laying on the ground looking up at the sky when Amir rushed over and said, “That was AWESOME!” Apparently I had linked turns a few times at the end of the run (by accident) right before I fell. Okay, awesome, but painful! My tailbone still isn’t quite the same.

I left with a few skills under my belt (and a very bruised tailbone), and once we were back home I immediately went out and purchased my own board, bindings, boots, helmet (critical!), and goggles.

We went nearly every weekend to Whitetail Resort in Pennsylvania to practice, practice, practice. Thank goodness for the small hills and gentle slopes of a PA mountain, unlike the “real” mountains of Colorado. Much better for a beginner! Though we don’t have much in the way of real snow here – it’s mostly man-made snow over a hard layer of ice, so there are pros and cons. (Falling on ice is a major con.)

Here I am taking a short break on the side of the beginner trail. In addition to the learning curve, snowboarding as a beginner is exhausting! Thankfully all those waterproof layers allow me to sit in the snow off to the side and rest every once in a while.

I finally learned to connect everything together once I actually got OFF of the bunny trail, and went to a more difficult but less populated green trail. Look how crowded that bunny hill is! So many people to run into. Once I had a little more room, everything just clicked, and I started linking turns – this time on purpose. Yay!

And with that, I crossed off #49 on my old 101 in 1001 list for prosperity and to you know, keep it official. I’m really looking forward to our second season, hopefully with fewer bruises! P.S. We don’t really say, “shredding the gnar” except to joke around, but snowboard slang is pretty fun. “Sweet cherry cherry pow-pow” means fresh, untouched snow (powder). And there were a few occasions where I “scorpioned,” meaning I fell face-first downhill with my board overhead. There are no pictures of that, thankfully.

So what about you? Are there any new hobbies you want to try? Want to give snowboarding a try?! It’s (apparently) one of those things that you have to push through no matter how hard it is at first, and if you’re patient (and stubborn) enough, everything will just click and it gets really fun! Let me know if you decide to try it! And if you need any advice on protective crash gear, I’ve done TONS of research on pads, helmets, wrist guards, etc. And I’ve done lots of crashing, so I can vouch for what works. 🙂

December 12, 2012