Vero and I packed the car and hit the road on Friday evening after I got a shot for Hepatitis A. Hey, you should never take the chance on those types of things! I also got some medication for malaria but there were only two reported cases of it in the past six months so I had no real worries (although I had heard that there was an outbreak of it in the past week while I was there! Must confirm that…)
We arrived at Aunt Dinah and Uncle Richard’s place in good time and hung out with Aidan and Paige who were spending the night. We watched a bit of Shrek 3 and I had a few beers while we all chatted about our upcoming trips (Aunt and Uncle are heading to Hawaii in a month’s time!).
The next day I awoke to ask Nanny if I could go through her photo albums as I didn’t really have any photos of my own with her and Granddad back in the younger years. I stumbled upon some great photos of them both as well as some others like a picture where my Great-Grandfather, Grandfather, Dad and myself are in the same picture. That was a gem of a find. I ended up taking a slew of pictures with me to Wal-Mart and Vero and I spent the next hour scanning and printing them off.
This was a tedious process as these old photos were not necessarily a standard 4×6″ size. So we had to crop a few and a lot of them needed colour correction which is hard to deal with because it’s all about personal choice when changing the colours. Vero had a good eye and at one point she was looking away and I had made my grandparents look like they came from Jamaica with a red tan! Woops! Went a little crazy with the red colour there.
In the end, it was worth the time and money to get these treasures in my photo collection. I would also like to do the same with the Patterson side of the family and I’m sure Nanny Ruth will be reading this soon enough and perhaps she can help me out with that venture.
We then headed out into downtown Toronto to visit Katie, Paul and Sarah. I do enjoy Toronto. Just parking the car and walking down Bloor Street to get some drinks for the evening put a smile on my face as the streets were a bustle with people getting ready for their evening.
We had some good laughs after some wine and some great Chinese food. We also tried to mimic this video Katie found on Facebook where you videotape someone trying to lip-sync someone’s else talking in the background. While we found this hilarious while attempting it, I have looked at the videos and I don’t think we did a great job. Katie commented “It was either we sucked at lip syncing or it was the five bottles of wine that messed it up!”
Vero and I then dropped them off at the karaoke bar for the night as we didn’t want to stay out all night. Thanks to Katie for having us over for a few drinks and it was also nice to see Paul and Sarah (Paul being the one who so graciously adorned this website with some photos of me while I was away).
*Note that I’ll be archiving these posts in due time so they appear on the actual dates that the events occurred but considering you’ll want to read my exploits of the trip up front and center, I will wait until later to do that.*
iplaying: Sunkissed – The Smashing Pumpkins (American Gothic)