Fabulous Friends

One of the highlights of our trip was seeing old friends. One of the benefits of having lived almost everywhere in the US is that God has blessed us with friends in Christ at just about every place.

Thanks to the Hughes for not only hosting us in Kentucky but also for the many years of incredible preaching, teaching, counsel and modeling of the Christian life. We learned so much from you in our early parenting years. Andrew was just a month or so old when we first came to sit under Jack's preaching. Crazy how time flies.

And thanks to the Bradleys for hosting us in Ohio! It was so great to meet Bennett for the first time! What a blessing it was to see how the Lord is continuing His work in you both after the years apart. It was truly gratifying to me and very healing too as your pastor to see how God used our brief time together in Albuquerque to bring such a deep and life long friendship in Christ.

Our summer vacation was a blast. And it only took me 4 months to finish blogging about it!

Toronto

The last stop on our trip was in Toronto. This was our first trip as a family outside the US. As we like to do in big cities that we've never been to before, we jumped on a big bus tour.

Strangely, Toronto didn't have much history. Several fires in the last century had burned down pretty much everything historical. So there were some random things like this car in the building!

And this building made with gold on the outside. I forgot to take a picture of it earlier but it's in between the other two buildings. It was just the windows that were gold plated.

And of course, we saw the hockey hall of fame. We're not hockey fans at all so we just drove by.

We took a little boat tour as well. And I must admit the view from the water was quite nice. Andrew thought so too.

We had grand designs to visit the St. Lawrence Market. It's the biggest or one of the biggest public markets in the world. We were excited!

But it was closed! So bummed!

We did some research about original Toronto foods. Did you know that about half of the people from Toronto are immigrants? It's grown so much in recent years as well. So when we looked up foods to eat in Toronto, we got lots of Pho and Thai foods. But we did find this butter tart as an original Toronto food. Emz wasn't that impressed though.

This picture just about sums up our trip to Toronto. Somehow it just didn't jive with us. We got doused by a couple of big thunderstorms. We were underwhelmed by the lack of history and the food that we did eat. In fairness, the boys and girl don't really enjoy any city. And this one seemed to not have much of any feel or character to it. It seemed so stale. I wanted to like it, but I couldn't. Oh well. We can't love every place. But it was a good experience to see some place different. We even had Korean food here that was very different too.