It's Halloween. Or Samhain*, for you traditionalists, or Wiccan types. There are a lot of web sites about Halloween -- many of them fraudulent (run by hysterical religious groups), many of them confused, many of them interesting and possibly informative -- but on the web, who can tell? You can just make stuff up, and as long as you present your case in a reasoned manner, many people will just accept what you have to say.**

Anyway, there are a few things that everyone who isn't a hysterical religious group seems to agree on about Halloween.

It is Celtic, particularly Irish, in origin.

When it was a Celtic holiday, it marked a turning point of the year -- the end of the year, and the beginning of the winter season. Like all such times, it was considered a time when the veil between the natural and the supernatural worlds was particularly thin. So on the one hand it was an auspicious time to foretell the future and that sort of thing. And, on the other hand, there were customs that were supposed to keep evil spirits from taking advantage and snatching your children into the fairy realms or whatever evil spirits like to do. Honoring ancestors was also involved.

It is one of those pagan holidays that has a Catholic holiday layered on top. The Catholic holidays are All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). These holidays involve rememberance of the dead. According to our New Orleans cemetery tour guide, people still gather there on November 1 and 2 to remember their ancestors. He pointed to an ornate wrought-iron bench and indicated that this is what the bench was for. He claimed that all ornate wrought-iron outdoor furniture had its origin in New Orleans cemeteries. Or maybe I'm just saying that.

The current incarnation of Halloween is a modern North American interpretation of traditions brought by the many Irish immigrants in the late 19th/early 20th century. The interesting thing is, nobody is really sure where it started. Nobody can point to a particular incident and say there, that's the first trick-or-treating, the first jack-o-lantern, the first Halloween party. By the 1940s and 50s it was already a well-established holiday with the well-known icons in place, to judge from the clip art of the era. The modern Halloween has a few elements that I think are key: disguise, morbid sense of humor, prankster spirit, harvest festival, hedonism (which in children manifests itself as GIANT BAGS OF CANDY), spookiness (the modern version of "the veil is thin"). Rememberance of ancestors is notably absent, but many of the other aspects still reflect the holiday's less materialistic origins.

(A note about the name: Halloween, Hallowe'en, Hallows Even, Eve of All Hallows, night before All Hallows/All Saints. That's Hallows as in hallowed ground. You know, sacred.)

The Mexican Day(s) of the Dead is an interesting side note, because, as far as I can tell, it is primarily the Catholic holidays of November 1 and 2 getting layered on top of Aztec/Mayan traditions. So you have two layers of paganism to only one layer of Catholicism! Pagans win! (Okay, it doesn't really work like that.) It's a completely separate, parallel tradition from modern Halloween. I'm hoping the growing Hispanic influence in the U.S. will cause Day of the Dead to influence mainstream Halloween celebrations.

So, have fun, dress up, laugh in the face of mortality, eat too much candy, try to creep yourself out into believing there's more to the world than blatant materialism -- and while you're at it, spare a thought for your departed ancestors.

--Julie McGalliard (Home)

*The word "Samhain" is apparently pronounced "sow-WANE". Those Celts and their wacky approach to Romanization. Paul's theory is that this may be deliberate, especially on the part of the Welsh. "You can make us use your Roman letters, but they still won't make any sense to you! Ha!"^^

**I'm planning to use this factor in my "George W. Bush is, in fact, the Antichrist" campaign.^^

Thursday 28 August

Midnight -- late night so we can look at Mars on one of the nights it is closest to the Earth in 60,000 years. I look at it through Devon's telescope, which is living on MikeK's deck while Devon is living in Japan. (Yet another Bellingham software refugee fled to distant lands -- although to be fair, Mary W. fled only as far as Portland).

Using a telescope turns out to be more annoying than I had envisioned. The image shimmies, refusing to come into focus.

"Is that the polar ice cap? It looks like the polar ice cap!"

"I think it's the polar ice cap...but maybe it's something on the lens."

I was hoping for something that looks like a Science News photograph, and instead get something that seems (almost) less impressive than just gazing with my naked eyes on the insanely bright and distinctly orange-tinted start that is Mars. My eyes are a little bleared, and I notice that the star really does appear to be sending out five spears of light from its center.

Wow.

Mars.

I think about Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson -- a book which I found remote and hard to get interested in, but which nevertheless filled me with a rekindled passion for the notion of space colonization and terraforming (not for me, though. I'm kind of claustrophobic, an extremely bad candidate for space station living. I want to visit AFTER there's a functioning ecosystem where you can breathe the air. And sleep in cryogenic freeze or whatever until I'm there. ). I also recall the dragon books by Anne McCaffrey, which I loved in junior high. The "thread" that her science-fictiony dragons have to incinerate is a deadly organic-material-eating spore that is sent out from another planet in the solar system, which passes close enough for the spores to wiggle across the Icy Blackness of Space once in a great while. More frequently than 26,000 years. I wonder if there's anything weird that happens when Mars is this close, and am a little disappointed when it seems like there's probably not. Anything weird, that is. Deadly spores, or space aliens coming by for a visit.

Paul & I go back home for a few hours of sleep and leave town at 4 a.m. Ulysses drives us to the airport at 6 a.m. Then we get on a plane that will take us to Phoenix. We move down the aisles in that weird, halting, plane-aisle-shuffle. Every time we stop the guy behind me crashes into the back of my legs. By the time we get to our seats, this has happened a dozen times.

Naturally, he ends up being in the seat to my right.

I try to sleep, but mister bumpy-legs is (of course) one of those people whose elbows always seem to be in my way whenever I start to relax. I huddle against Paul and curse myself for not having a book handy -- I knew I would be tired on this flight and figured I would just flip through the Sky mall catalogue until falling asleep. So, bored, with that low grade sinus headache that seems to plague every airplane trip, I study the guy next to me. He is medium height, plump in a round way that reminds me of a cartoon, or a kid's toy. (Or, the title character in George R.R. Martin's story "The Pear-Shaped Man.") He is wearing glasses and a button-down shirt with pens in the pocket, and comments out loud in response to random external events (turbulence, announcements from the cockpit) without seeming to notice or care whether anyone has heard him.

In short, a classic nerd.

I wonder if he is going to Torcon.

But, the books he is reading seem to be some kind of mystery or spy thriller, not science fiction at all. The books are odd. They are the size and general design of pulps from the 30s through the 60s, but they don't look terribly old. Maybe they're from the 70s. I think maybe they were still making pulps in the 70s. By the 80s, paperbacks weren't like that anymore. The man seems to have at least three books and is cycling through them, reading a bit of one, then a bit of another. I don't understand this behavior. I don't want to think about it. I want to sleep. Instead I drink tomato juice and eat packets of peanuts. There is no meal on this flight. There is no meal on any of our flights.

In Phoenix we scramble to buy overpriced Burger King food (3.95 for a veggie burger? Sheesh!) before our next plane. I scrape the mayonnaise off the bun, and wish I was eating a falafel from the downtown falafel cart guy instead. Falafel is also 3.95. I hate airports.

I used to like them, when I was younger and everything about airports seemed to carry with it the tantalizing suggestion of travel and exotic destinations. But I guess I'm jaded. Now airports just seem like a necessary evil.

I sleep some on the plane to Toronto, and hope this means I won't just collapse when we get there. I'm excited as we circle in on the city. The daylight hasn't left yet, and I can clearly see the many green spaces and Lake Ontario. I'm picturing Toronto as a pretty, green town, not too hot, with breezes from the lake.

I'm such a damned optimist sometimes.

Well, anyway.

We land. We go through customs. This is relatively painless, and gives me a stamp on my virgin passport. I'm irrationally excited by this.

"Look, I got a stamp! They stamped me!"

Things go downhill rapidly when we can't figure out how to get our rental car. The place we made reservations with said they have a desk at the airport. After lugging our bags up and down the airport corridors a few times and asking various helpful-looking and uniformed people for assistance, we finally notice a desk labeled "Traveler's Aid." The women are quite helpful and call our rental car agency. They do NOT, in FACT have a desk at the airport. Europecar. The DON'T have a desk at the Toronto (well, the Mississauga) airport. Remember that.

So we wait for a long time for our car to arrive. The picking up/dropping off area at the Toronto airport has "decks" which are numbered, and the number is tied to a large concrete pillar. We are waiting at deck three or four -- near the front. Every time a van or bus of any kind drives through we perk up in anticipation, read the labeling on its side, then sink down in disappointment. This seems to happen about three hundred times while we are waiting for the Europecar driver. I see cars go by over and over. The Hilton. Tai Chi Studio.

When the Europecar driver finally arrives he is driving an ordinary car, not a van or a bus. This makes both of us a little twitchy, and Paul makes him show the logo on his key chain -- any little thing to show this isn't just some kind of scam. The guy thinks this is funny. Turns out that Europecar picks you up and drops you off in the actual car that they rent you. I don't know if I like this system or not. But it does mean you have to move your bags less often.

It is around nine p.m. Toronto time when we arrive at our hotel. We've been traveling all day, and this always gives me a surreal feeling. I'm no longer sure if time or space has any coherent meaning. My brain keeps trying to turn Lake Ontario into the ocean, but it doesn't smell right and it's in the wrong place anyway.

We are sharing a room with Clint and Donna. It turns out to be (ohmigod!) right on the lake and insanely cheap besides, but the price of that is that it's not exactly a regular hotel room. Most of the rooms in this tower (Harbour Square) are condominiums. There's only one key for the room. This means that every time we leave or enter, we have to deposit the key with the concierge, which makes me feel like I'm starring in some kind of sex farce. And the layout of the room is weirdly narrow and long, like a train car.

Did I mention you can see the lake?

We go out for a walk and eat dinner at Captain John's Harbour Boat Restaurant. It is a restaurant in an old Detroit fireboat retired in 1969 -- the kind of dumb cheesy coolness that Paul and I are both suckers for. It's the kind of place that was ultra-fine dining about 30 years ago (everything is red velvet. Oo-la-la!) and now seems kind of retro, if they've had the sense to NOT try updating it. They haven't. We have mediocre red wine from the Niagara area (they make wine there -- who knew?), pretty good Manhattan style clam chowder, and seafood crepes that are a mixture of pretty good (the crepes themselves and the crab filling) and really delicious (the mixed seafood gravy on the top of the crepes. mmmmmm.....). Overall, a positive experience. I suspect the boat of being haunted, but can't come up with any evidence to support my theory.

We head out to the convention. Parties and night activities are in the Royal York Hotel, a grand old hotel with a verdigris roof and nifty turn-of-the-last-century architecture. We walk much further than we need to, on account of being on the wrong street, and are quite tired by the time we actually locate the hotel. I try to take the occasion to observe Toronto, and my impressions so far are all positive. Decent weather, not too hot, and I feel fairly safe on the streets, like I understand what's going on. There are people out polishing the sidewalks. That's what it looks like, anyway. Out in front of the hotels and the bank towers, people are operating these circular-brush things that look like floor-polishers. I think "Toronto is the sort of place where they polish the sidewalks at night." Not too much litter.

Parties are WorldCon parties. We run around madly looking for people we know, and beer. We find both at the Kansas City party.

Note: If you've never been to a World Science Fiction Convention, one of the key characteristics is "bid parties," which are hosted by people who hope to hold a WorldCon in the future, and have parties where they ply you with alcohol, food, and photos of their convention centers in the hope that you will not be too hung over or cheap (there's a voting fee) to vote for the next WorldCon site, and furthermore, that you will vote for them.

It's a shame. The KC people are nice and have beer. But they are up against L.A. (actually Anaheim. Which is L.A., as far as most people are concerned. Even people who live there. It's a SoCal thing.) Everyone is pretty sure L.A. is going to win.

We go to bed around 2 a.m., worried about disturbing our roommates.

Friday 29 August

I wake, to Toronto birds. Seagulls -- tiny Atlantic seagulls -- and pigeons (of course -- is there any human habitation on the planet without pigeons?) -- and those ubiquitous little brown sparrows that we have here, too. No crows. I notice this right away, because I associate them so strongly with the general bird assortment, and keep an eye out the rest of the time we are there. I do not see any crows. I miss them. Toronto does not seem to have any bugs, really, and I don't miss them. I saw a couple of spiders in webs on the railings next to Captain John's, so I suppose there must be some bugs. But the only thing I see most of the time is butterflies. Gorgeous splashy butterflies with huge wings in orange and yellow and black. Monarchs? Maybe. I'm not that up on butterfly entomology. (Note: yes, I know butterflies are insects. Do I have to explain the difference between "bugs" and "insects"?)

We head to the convention and stop for coffee at a place called Second Cup, which turns out to be a chain. The coffee is terrible.

The convention center is only a few blocks away. Paul finds that V-con has a promotional table, which we sit at for a while and study the programming. Apparently, TorCon had one of those administrative crises that conventions are known for, and, while there is a pocket program, none of the information in it can be trusted. We study a grid for today only and I pick out a couple of things to go to. I picture the poor sleepless overworked people who must be producing these daily guides.

I go to programming today. I'm not sure what -- the days of the actual convention run together a bit. I think it might be something about research that has Connie Willis and Terry Pratchett on it, and also the China Miéville reading. China Miéville is one of those writers I've been hearing a lot about, who I haven't read yet. His room is much too small, and the reading is amazing, and he is...well, the man is headed for that Neil Gaiman rock-star-writer status, mark my words. He possesses that same rare combination of artistic talent, fierce wit, and personal charisma. And. Um. Sex appeal. (Well, it's true. Mr. Gaiman is much more my type, a fact which was dramatically evidenced at a certain World Horror Convention where Mr. Gaiman and My Own Dear Husband were wearing quite similar leather jackets and had hair of a similar length, and darn it, if they didn't look so much alike from the back that husband Paul reported the frequent and mildly ego-bruising experience of seeing women try to catch his attention, only to display severe disappointment when he turned around...but Mr. Miéville certainly has a charmingly well-muscled English bouncer vibe. Ah. Hem. Anyway.) I head to the dealers' room and look at really well-made corsets I can't afford, and buy a copy of Miéville's The Scar.

At 6 p.m. we meet the Wharf Rat Irregulars in East End Mario's, a New York-themed restaurant with bad beer and pretty good Italian food. The Irregulars are a loosely defined group of (mostly) gentlemen we see every year that we go to a WorldCon. We met them early one morning in Glasgow, Scotland, when the parties were running out of alcohol and they were sharing a bottle of Romanian Swill (some kind of unidentifiable, yet pungently alcoholic, homebrew allegedly from Romania). This was one of those nights when Paul and I were separated for a time, which usually means that I (an apparently unattached female) magnetically attract an assortment of heterosexual males. Then Paul found me. There are two things that happen at this point. The males realize I am attached and drift away, never to be seen again. Or, they stick around and get to know Paul, too, a process which often leads to close and long-term friendships all around.

So the Irregulars include people from Maryland, Ireland, Sweden, Washington State, and other places I'm not too sure of. The main thing we all have in common is that we like science fiction, science fiction conventions, and drinking.

At night, once again, we go to parties. I end up spending quite a while in a party -- "Beyond the Wall" -- celebrating the works of George R.R. Martin, the guest of honor for this convention. George R.R. Martin is a long-term science fiction and horror writer who, a few years ago, started writing a mammoth series of fantasy cubes (Paul's term for very thick fantasy -- as thick as it is tall.) starting with A Game of Thrones. This series seems to have brought him a lot of recognition and commercial success. I haven't read any of them at the time of the party, but I end up talking for a while to a pretty, lanky young woman in a truly stunning vinyl cat suit about how excited she is -- about his work, to be here where he's the guest. She usually goes to DragonCon in Atlanta. But she had to come here. Because of George Martin. She's one of the party hosts.

We part, and I watch the males in the room drooling on the inky black vinyl. It's kind of cute, kind of creepy. Guys are like that. The party has a melting ice sculpture which I assume is pertinent to the books. I can still read the words "Winter is Coming.." I decide that I really should read Game of Thrones, which I borrowed from Ulysses and Carol back when I was unemployed and thought I'd have time to read the whole series. As I leave, I run into Ronita and Dr. Dave. Ronita, a talented artist who usually works in the silk-painting medium, is wearing a corset-thing that goes all the way down to her knees. She describes it as a "mid-life-crisis" sort of outfit. I'm impressed. I didn't know I'd see anything more impressive than the vinyl cat suit tonight. Everyone else is impressed, too. Especially guys. Guys are like that.

I go to bed a couple of hours before Paul. By now I'm sure we're disturbing our roommates.

Saturday 30 August

We go to a place called Shopsy's for breakfast. We are supposed to meet people there, but they never show up. This is not unusual for conventions. I have potato pancakes which are greasy, but okay. The coffee is terrible. All the coffee here is terrible. I'm starting to wonder if it's the water. It tastes all right if you drink it, but maybe there's some mysterious compound that makes coffee taste bad. I get coffee later at Timothy's, in the convention center. It's bad too.

I'm starting to hate Toronto. It smells terrible here, in spite of the nightly sidewalk-polishing. Every time I cross the street I smell diesel and sewage. I assume the sewage smell is from some festering storm drain, but Dr. Dave tells me there's a sewage treatment plant just a little way up the lake. Next to the sugar factory. He points. Yup, that's practically in the downtown core. If he's right -- -what a remarkably stupid place to put a sewage treatment plant. And if he's not? What the heck is causing that smell? Toronto isn't like New Orleans, it's not famous for smelling bad. What's going on?

Is it the hot dogs?

This is one of the weird things in Toronto. Every block has between two and four mobile food carts, and every single one of them serves hot dogs. This is bizarre, and uncanny. How could any city consume so many hot dogs? Even taking into account the turkey and veggie dogs, it's astonishing. It's sick, and it's wrong. Nobody should eat that many hot dogs. Especially not my husband Paul.

We eat dinner with Pallé at a place called Mövenpick, right across the street from the convention center. I think it's Belgian, or Swiss, or something like that. I get some coffee. It's not terrific, but it's by far the best coffee I've had in this town. The food's okay. Expensive. Nothing surprising. I try a tiny bit of Pallé's steak tartar, because I have never had it, and it's actually very good. Later, I think about the implications of eating raw steak in a foreign country. But even if they had Mad Cows in Toronto, prions aren't killed by cooking, so it probably doesn't matter.

I go to some programming today. The thing I remember is the Guest of Honor speech by George R.R. Martin. It's a prepared speech, which I wasn't expecting, but it's quite good.

Hugos tonight. If you wanna know who won, you can check here. The dramatic Hugos now separate long and short form Hugos. I'm not sure why, except possibly to keep Lord of the Rings from winning three years in a row. This means that Joss Whedon is competing against himself three times (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly episodes all nominated). Buffy wins. Jane Espenson, one of the writers of the episode, is actually there to collect the statue. I am impressed and have a brief, vain hope that this means she will be on programming later, or that I'll run into her at a party. Peter Jackson has prepared a videotaped acceptance speech for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Neil Gaiman is there to collect for Coraline. Paul tells me that he later goes to the Hugo Losers' Party, carrying his Hugo. Which seems like gloating. Paul says that no fewer than three winners do this during the time he is at the Losers' Party.

I send Paul off the parties and curl up in a big high-backed chair on the mezzanine of The Royal York Hotel. I'm feeling out of sorts and antisocial, which happens to me at conventions -- it's like I have a sociability circuit that burns out and has to be recharged. So I pull out my notebook and red fountain pen and my intention is to record my trip thus far, while it's all relatively new and fresh.

I fall asleep right away.

I wake up a couple of hours later and circulate through the parties. I'm in the elevator and notice just how bizarre the floor-numbering scheme in this hotel is. The daily convention 'zine from Thursday talked about the lowest party floor being the "first floor -- second floor to you yanks." However, this is a bald-faced lie of a magnitude worthy of the Bush administration. The numbering in the elevator goes something like this : B, L, C, CC, M, A, 1, 2 (and so on up.) The "first" floor is actually five or six flights of stairs from the ground floor.

The same 'zine mentioned that the 8th floor might be haunted. I try it out for a while, but I think there are too many people around. Ghosts are shy. However, there is something bizarre and Shining-like about this hotel. The floors don't make any sense, and the stairs seem to twist through multiple illogical dimensions. At some point in the evening a stairway dumps me out right in front of a plastic surgery clinic. I can't figure out how I got there. I can't figure out how you're supposed to get there. I don't see the elevator, and the stairway leading down seems obscure and secretive; I have to go down a hallway to get there. Pallé talks about finding himself out on a balcony surrounded by gargoyles with no idea how he got there. Later, I run into a few other people who ended up in the mysterious plastic surgery dimension. All of us were equally baffled by the experience.

Tonight, I'm the last one in the hotel room.

Sunday 31 August

I find out, after it is over, that Neil Gaiman scheduled a last-minute reading at the convention. I would be cranky about missing this if not for the fact that I saw him at the San Diego Comic Convention, where he was on every panel, and sometimes with Dave McKean.

It's Sunday. We are desperate for some decent coffee. Paul tries some at a market that is near the lake. It's terrible. We take a long, circuitous route to the convention so that we will pass a Starbucks we vaguely remember being out there somewhere in downtown Toronto. The route takes us through a historical district and we stop to look at the cathedral. The pigeons on the cathedral grass seem abnormally fat and lethargic, hardly glancing at us as we walk past.

We find the Starbucks. It's closed. We find another one. It's closed too. They're closed on Sundays. Everything is closed on Sundays.

Man, I hate this town.

By now, the con burnout is really kicking in. It's starting to blur. Did that happen Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Who knows? I see people on panels -- China Miéville, Connie Willis, George R.R. Martin, Terry Pratchett, and Esther Friesner and Nalo Hopkinson, who are guests of honor (honour) at Vcon next weekend. A lot of intelligent discussion, and the occasional idiotic remark, about literature, humor and Canada-U.S. relations. The panels are a little odd in their conception sometimes, and not well matched to the people who are on them. (Connie Willis on a filking panel?) I don't know if this is an artifact of the programming mix-up. I'm also not quite sure why there is so much filking at this convention -- one whole floor of the Royal York seems devoted to nothing but filking -- but then, I've never been sure why there is so much filking, period.

I think I end up eating at that Swiss place again, and I think the food is pretty good. I don't manage to have any food better than pretty good the whole time I'm in Toronto, which is a great disappointment. Canada's largest city must have really good food somewhere, right? Right?

I skip the masquerade. I do make it to David Levine's reading. David Levine is a Portland author who I know from local conventions. Along with his wife Kate Yule he puts out the terrific mini-zine Bento.

Then it's parties again.

Our roommates must be horribly tired of us by now.

Monday 01 September

Today is the last day of the convention, but we go sightseeing instead. Paul is determined to go up the CN Tower which is -- let's see here -- "The Largest Free-Standing Structure in the World." Now, there is a thing about these big towers (like the Space Needle) with restaurants at the top -- a lot of times you can ride up for free if you are going to eat in the revolving restaurant. We try to find out if that is the case here, and cannot get a straight answer out of anyone. We later find out that yes, of course you can ride up for free if you're eating in the restuarant. But instead, because we are afraid of paying for a really expensive ride up in a fast elevator and also for a really expensive lunch, we end up paying for the elevator and a sort of expensive lunch in a non-revolving restaurant instead.

The food is pretty good.

While we are eating lunch (Paul and I and Dr. Dave) there is some kind of air show going on over the lake. So every once in a while a formation of planes goes zipping by. We are at the same level as the planes. This is much more entertaining than it seems like it should be. There is also a baseball game going on right below us, which is sort of interesting, except that it is baseball, which is not interesting. After lunch we ride up to the highest level -- SkyPod -- which is 33 stories higher than the main observation deck, 1,465 feet high vs. 1,136. That extra 300 feet seems to make a difference, and suddenly I'm all woozy and disoriented, sinuses aching. Yes, it's very, very tall. Very tall. Can we go down now please?

We ride down to the glass floor. The glass floor is a small patch (25 square feet) of extra-strong glass on which you can walk around while looking straight down 1,122 feet. That is, you could walk around on it -- if not for the people lying down on it having their pictures taken.

I lie down, and have my picture taken.

Paul and I get into the rental car and drive to Niagara Falls. Neither one of us has been to the Canadian side of the falls (since childhood anyway) and have heard that "it's much better than the American side." We are listening to the university radio (CIUT) most of the drive out there, and hear some punk salsa klezmer, plus other great stuff we've never heard before.

It's late in the afternoon when we drive into town. I'm getting excited as we drive toward Horseshoe Falls, when I start to hear the low roaring of the water, see the mist boiling up from the gorge like the steam from a giant boiling cauldron. It feels like we're approaching something vast, majestic. Something phenomenal. And we are.

But there, behind the mist, are the grey shadows of the hotels, motels, Minolta-sponsored observation towers and half-built casinos. We are also approaching something that has been a tourist trap for more than a hundred years.

The falls themselves are as stunning as nature has made them. They are too enormous and powerful to be subsumed by puny commercial exploitation. The churning mist creates a constant light rain, and soon we're soaked through. Everything is soggy -- feels like home. We pass a poetically ruined power plant, and people in rain ponchos that announce they have taken the "Maid of the Mist" tour. Paul makes fun of me for stopping to take pictures that will surely be nothing but white mist.

After we have walked along the falls to the end of the observation area, we turn left and walk up the hill into town. The street we are on is Clifton Hill -- "Fun by the Falls"! It turns out to be a demented and noisy, yet dull, carnival midway where you can play mini golf, eat at idiotic theme chains like the Hard Rock Café and The Rainforest Café, and (I'm not kidding) go through about a dozen different haunted-house type attractions. Paul starts heading toward Castle Dracula, thinking it looks like it might be a bar. It's not. Right next to it is House of Frankenstein. Also not a bar. It does have a Burger King inside. And it also has a humongous statue of Frankenstein's monster (I'm REALLY not kidding) EATING A GIANT HAMBURGER.

So wrong. So very wrong.

We crest the hill and start to head up what looks like a main street, toward the falls again. We are hoping to find a restaurant where we can eat and also look at the falls. But, we can't see the falls from anywhere up on the ridge. It seems strange. They're RIGHT DOWN THERE. They're ENORMOUS. And yet, you can't see them from the town. We give up looking for a falls view and start looking for a promising restaurant, historic buildings, a park -- any touch of civic grace or dignity. Instead, all we find is more haunted-house attractions. Empty strip malls. Muddy torn-up sidewalks. Forlorn motels from the 1950s and 60s, whatever views they might once have possessed solidly blocked by glassy monstrosities from the 80s and 90s. A grandiose, unfinished casino.

"This is the worst city I've ever seen."
"Really? That's what I was thinking. Sorry about the mud."

We take an inclined railway back down to the Niagara Parks area. This is cheap, and seems more fun than watching a monster eat a hamburger. We pay money to go down into some tunnels and look at the falls from behind the curtain of water, and also from an observation deck that is right next to the falls. Then we eat dinner at the Table Rock Restaurant, operated by the Parks, fine dining and very reasonable prices compared to the Minolta Observation Tower menu we looked at. We're right on top of the falls as it gets dark.

The food is -- once again -- pretty good.

As we're leaving, they shine big floodlights on the falls and we stop to look. We agree that we like the way the mist glows, but liked the falls better in daylight. Then the floodlights change color. Purple, red, blue. We agree that it's cheesy. But not as bad as a monster eating a hamburger.

On our walk back to the car, we occasionally pass through clouds of fluttering insects. I'm not sure what they are. They're a little like moths, or flies, or crickets -- they come up from the ground as we pass, fly around, then settle to the ground again. It's annoying, but also strangely reassuring. I didn't realize how unsettled I was by the lack of insects in Toronto.

Back to the Royal York Hotel for one final party -- the convention's "dead dog" party where all the diehards gather. The party hosts are trying to finish off a bottle of Gordon's, my favorite cheap gin, lamenting that nobody seems to drink gin anymore. I offer to help. This is undoubtedly a mistake.

Paul and I walk back to the hotel room one final time. Most nights we walk back through an odd little round park created by a freeway onramp -- and this is one nice thing about Toronto, lots of unexpected green space. But, in one corner of this park is a Hooters billboard. This billboard, which I hardly noticed at first, has started to really annoy me. I've never liked Hooters anyway -- the coy name, that stupid owl, the orange uniforms. But there's something about this particular board that especially grates on my nerves. Something about the carefully posed women, hair fluffed like it's 1986, with the smooth tans and the hard butts and the smiles that don't reach their eyes. The more I look at them, the crazier they look. They're mocking me, with their Photoshopped perfection. I'm obsessed with images of myself climbing the billboard, culture jamming on their malicious vacant stares.

But all I can think to do is -- devil horns. Moustaches.

"Hey Paul. You wanna deface the Hooters billboard?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You know. Um. Like giving them devil horns and broken-out teeth and stuff."
"Nah. Not worth getting arrested in a foreign country."
"Yeah. That's what I thought. What if I came up with something really clever to do instead?"
"No. Just...no."

We annoy our roommates for the last time this trip.

Tuesday 02 September

It is morning.

Light.

Daylight.

Oooooo....

Today, I am ferociously hung over. This is nature's punishment for too much gin. I know this. I know it's my own fault. I have no one to blame. No excuses.

But still...owwww.....my head....

No matter how miserable, I am still determined to go to the tourist activities we have already planned to fill the day before our evening flight back to Seattle. So I sip Perrier and eat a handful of peanuts and try to concentrate on scanning the streets for a Starbucks, and not on my stomach. We see one, in what seems to be a university area, and park on the street nearby. We get coffee. It isn't -- well, it isn't good, but it's better than any other Toronto coffee I've had.

We get back to our car. There is a ticket on the windshield. This ticket is for "failing to pay" which confuses us, since there is no meter. Outraged, we stomp up and down the street looking for some explanation. Eventually we find it. Toronto has some kind of bizarre system that I have never seen before and was never pointed out in any of the tourist information that we read, where street parking is paid for at a single box, like a pay lot. The boxes seem to be placed on the corners, frequently obscured by somebody's mountain of SUV, so unless you KNOW it's there, you won't see it. They have to KNOW this is a major scam. They must have little parking gremlins poised in every alley, waiting to pounce. We were out of the car a grand total of ten minutes.

The ticket is $30 Canadian.

"Expensive cup of coffee."
"You got that right."
"It should be better, at that price."
"Yeah."
"Maybe it's just my hangover, but I kind of hate this town."

Now we go to the Bata Shoe Museum, pay for parking again. But the museum is going to be free. We're sure of that. It says so in the AAA guide. Museum is free on the first Tuesday of every month.

Except that they changed it. Now it's free, I don't know, on Thursday nights that coincide with a full moon. The ladies running the museum seem completely baffled as to why we don't know about this already.

"We changed it all the way back in April."
"Yes, but these guides are only published once a year, usually at the beginning of the year. So there was no way for us to know that."
Blank stare.
"Back in April. Or it might have been May. It was months ago. Surely."

But, by now I really need a restroom (I am still, as you might recall, hung over), so we pay to go inside anyway. Besides -- you can't go all the way to Toronto and not go to the world's largest shoe museum. Can you? Well, I can't. Any more than Paul could not go up the CN Tower.

While Paul is waiting for me, he observes three or four groups come in and be just as surprised as we were by the change in free day policy, and see the ladies be just as clueless about why this could possibly inconvenience anyone.

The shoes are -- delightfully -- shoes. Medieval shoes, prehistoric shoes, Victorian shoes (ahhh...), Victoria's shoes (the white slippers the Queen was married in), shoes that climbed Mt. Everest (Norgay Tenzig's), boots that John Lennon wore when he was a Beatle. The displays are sharply put together, with lots of information. And, there are more shoes than we can look at before we have to get going to the next thing.

The next thing is, Casa Loma. "Toronto's Majestic Castle." Casa Loma is the gorgeous relic of a guy who had way too much money around the turn of the last century, and decided to spend it on his house. The results are stunning. Wooden paneling, marble, a full-sized pipe organ. Even more stunning, the restoration project managed to round up quite a bit of the original furniture to display (sold at auction when he, er, ran out of money. Before the house was finished, in fact.)

There are two observation towers that visitors are allowed to climb. Many steps up a series of long, narrow stairways. We are almost to the top of the Scottish Tower when I realize that my hangover is just about gone.

The observation towers are perfect, of the crenellated pseudo-Medieval type that anything calling itself a castle is required to have. I mention how disappointed I was as a child to be taken to see "Hearst Castle" and find NO TOWERS AT ALL.

Looking at downtown Toronto, framed by the stone of the tower and the green of the castle grounds, I almost feel I like the place.

We climb the other tower. Then we take the long tunnel that leads to the stables and a short trail that leads through the grounds, and then it's time to go to the airport, where Ben will pick us up.

We find ourselves on the same flight as Duane Wilkins, the book buyer for the University of Washington's superb science fiction/fantasy/horror section. He notices that I am carrying one of their black cloth book bags (a World Horror Convention 2000 souvenir) and seems pleased. We offer to give him a ride from SeaTac to wherever he needs to go.