Winging it in Toronto

TBD

Even though it poured all night we woke to blue skies. Yeah. Time to go take on Toronto. Ned wanted to visit SOMA, a bean to bar chocolate maker and I wanted to ride bikes and see the Old Distillery District. That was the goal for the day. We had no idea where any of these were. We headed for the beach district, parked the car, unloaded the bikes and started pedaling. Turns out Toronto has this awesome bike path that goes on for miles and miles taking you along the Ontario shore, through several parks and eventually dumps you into downtown.

We were a bit intimidated with all the traffic and construction downtown, so we pretended to be Westin guests and asked the concierge where SOMA was. Turns out we rode right by it several miles back. Sweet. By this time the sky begun to cloud over and we started feeling a few sprinkles. Every "Torontonian" seemed oblivious to the few drops and just kept on roller blading (which is big up here), riding bikes, walking, and even playing beach volleyball in their bikinis. Not wanting to look like a tourist, (could the camera around my neck and my long sleeves give me away?) we shrugged off the sprinkles and rode on.

Turns out SOMA was located in the Old Distillery! How's that for killing two birds with one stone? SOMA makes micro-batches of handcrafted chocolate from single origin sources. Who does that sound like?! Their shop is very small, but through a glass wall one can watch their chocolate making process. Ned loved the 80 year old melanger from Barcelona which SOMA recently acquired. It was really cool to see it in action. I enjoyed seeing the panning operation. It looks like a gigantic stainless steel cement mixer with a wide opening. Almonds were tumbling around and the operator was hand pouring in chocolate to coat them. Yum! Ned explained to me that the neat part about panning is that you can use untempered chocolate. The air that blows in from the duct tempers the chocolate as it cools and coats the almonds. The shop also had a cafe bar. I had a cafe latte and Ned tried a bicerin, which is a layered cream, espresso, and chocolate drink originating in Italy. Of course we bought several bars of chocolate, for research purposes. Their Peru bar was phenomenal! We are going to find out where they get their Peru beans. We'd love to try and roast some of those. The other bars were both good, I'd put them on par with ours.

The weather held and we made it back to Winnie in one piece. We rode 15 miles and hit the 200 mile marker on my bike odometer. (Thanks Neise!!!). The rest of the afternoon was spent checking out the beautiful University of Toronto and different neighborhoods. At one point when we drove past the ROM Museum, I clicked a picture of Winnie in the reflection off the windows. Pretty cool shot! The other "selfie" was taken in Toronto - humor me with my art shots:)

We are driving late tonight trying to get as close to the US border (Detroit) as we can. Not sure where we'll camp or when we'll pull in so thought I'd post this blog while we have wifi at the gas stop.