the rest of 2015: a hellacious summary

It’s 2016!  And here’s an exciting fact: 5 days in to 2016 I have already taken time to sit and write some fiction snippets one two separate occasions, which is probably more than I bothered to do in the entirety of 2015 – uh, oops.

So I did some pretty cool stuff in the last quarter of the year since the last time I ventured on to this corner of the internet (AKA September), including but not limited to:

Central/Western Day in Kzoo
I haven’t been to a WMU football game in probably 7 years (since I graduated), so this year we snagged some tickets & made a day out of it that included nitro coffee, breakfast beers, seeing some alum friends I haven’t visited in ages, and a mini-brewery tour of some local (but new to me!) breweries.

This is how to do a flight.

Toronto Cask Days 2015
Cask Days was one of my very favorite events of 2014, so I was more than stoked to go back in 2015, especially since we got early-in tickets, & I have, in the past year, learned to pace myself so that by 5 PM at a beer festival I am not a stumbling mess that can’t stay awake to meet for dinner later on.

Also involved in this trip was my very best Ottawa friends, my very best Toronto friends, a fancy ass whole wild boar dinner (listen: flaky pastry crust with an apple & bacon filling, cranberry coulis & vanilla ice cream), late night post-Jays game burritos, me spending $50+ at David’s Tea, and a few new delightful Toronto breweries.

Starting the trip off right in Sarnia at 11 am.

One of my all time favorite breweries (Bellwoods); ALL of my all time favorite people.

I thought I was completely stuffed until someone brought me this apple bacon wonder.

Red Wings Season Ticket Holder Appreciation Night #2
The auto industry came through for me again - I was hoping to get a handful of extra pucks signed for a giant display in my living room, but the entire arena was SOLD OUT??? Of pucks???  Regardless, it was a fun (free) night of skating on NHL arena ice, my girlfriend got a bunch of signatures on the onesie I gifted her at a baby shower & luckily my real goal was still accomplished:

Montreal!!
I spent American Thanksgiving with my very favorite travel partner in Montreal accomplishing not only a new NHL arena (I’m at 11/30!), but also (among many others) getting to grab some evening beers at Dieu du Ciel!, which is a brewery responsible in large part for some of my deeper diving into craft beer styles & which I always swore I would make it to eventually, and doing forearm stands in front of a bizarre architectural anomaly that I inexplicably researched & wrote about back during my senior year of college.

Also, Montreal has some gorgeous architecture, bomb street art, solid breweries, and CAT CAFES.

(Also – this trip allowed for a brief little jaunt down to Ottawa to drink to excess & see some of my absolute favorite people.)

The original Montreal smoked meat. I desperately miss this.

My lil' babe Luna :)

Turkish brunch!

Christmas / New Years
I’d just like to show off that I made the actual most amazing gorgonzola, cranberry & walnut stuffed beef tenderloin with a molasses/bourbon glaze & I have perhaps never eaten something so delicious in all of my prior life.  And then when that was over, I made crème brulee cheesecake with an actual torch.

Also we went fowling, and to a whiskey distillery WITH DOGS!!!

Noble Fish forever.

Rye & Rue <3

Here’s this other thing that happened: I went to a semi-fancy NYE party that culminated in a wild(ly terrible) rendition of “I Think We’re Alone Now” sung in to a bottle of champagne at midnight, followed up with some wrestling. I’m an adult & you can’t prove otherwise.

we the north

I've been going to Toronto since I was a teeny tiny child. I have Canadian citizenship, my grandparents used to live there (my grandma has since moved to Collingwood), and we used to spend days upon days there in the summer when I was young. As soon as I was old enough to appreciate them, my parents took me to all the tourist spots; the CN Tower, Chinatown, the Eaton Centre, games at Maple Leaf Gardens & the Rogers Centre, the Ontario Science Centre, Toronto exhibitions, reubens at Shopsy's...  But I haven't seen basically any of that stuff SINCE I was old enough to appreciate it.  A few months back my friend Kat suggested a trip up there for a Leafs game and had been filling my head ever since with all the super fantastic touristy things she'd never done, and I started getting really stoked to relive my childhood.....and drink more Canadian beer.

We both took Friday off work & I made a trip out to Ann Arbor to pick Kat up the night before....which of course required starting the weekend off with Miki sushi (during basically a tornado...) and a quick trip over to Arbor Brewing for some sour beer <3

I want all my sashimi to be salmon and all my sushi to be kanpyo + strawberries.

The most incredible thing I've ever experienced happened on the trip up (after a stop at Kelsey's for club sandwiches with PEAMEAL BACON <3 and to meet up with a friend of Kat's), which is absolutely zero traffic on the way in to the city. From London to Yonge & Gerrard in 2 hours. This will presumably never happen again in my lifetime.

Staying literally right on Yonge street was fabulous - we posted up the Delta Chelsea (I don't care if that's not what it's called anymore) for the weekend and it was completely fabulous. I used to stay there a lot with the family when we came up years back and it's only gotten nicer (but still has those mega-tall headboards I remember!).  We got there so early in the day that we decided to take a trip down to the Eaton Centre & do some shopping (ZARA!!!!!! Goodbye, $200....but one of my Toronto goals was to find this skirt, and I succeeded), sightseeing, and then back up the road to bar Volo for some Dieu du Ciel Rigor Mortis & Great Lakes Robohop (which is the closest to a DRIPA I have ever tasted in my life; A+) before coming back to the hotel to chill in the whirlpool(!!!).

My favorite building in Toronto <3

Saturday was tourist day, after a quick workout in the nicest hotel fitness center I've ever had the experience of using.  We took a nice walk down to the Hockey Hall of Fame, where I haven't been since 2007, ogled everything for a while & then set out again to the CN Tower where I gushed for like 45 minutes of standing in line about how excited I was to stand on the glass floor.

The view while I ran a couple miles.

 I MISS YOU PATRICK EAVESSSSSS :( :( :(

I LOVE this, and I was so happy to see this sort of recognition for such a horrible tragedy, but I did pitch a small fit in the middle of the HHOF over that glaring awful typo.

That ceiling, though...

Had to :)

Second favorite building in Toronto ;)

Highlight of the day - after watching my many attempts at getting a badass picture of both headstands on the glass floor as well as Eka Pada Koundinyasana, a random dude who I just watched do 61 pushups (on the glass floor) while his friend recorded him challenged me to a planking contest which I'm happy to report that I, in my faux cowboy boots and Zara-purchased shirt, sweating far more than I intended to do on my day out about town, kicked his ass at as was subsequently cheered for by this whole crowd I did NOT realize had accumulated around us, haha.

I see u Billy Bishop!

Nobody outplanks AMERICA.

Life goal: accomplished.

Glass floor selfie!

After the tower (and after a quick stop on Queen Street at the HBO pop up shop just so I could sit in the badass Game of Thrones throne), we hiked it over to & up Spadina for DIM SUM!  I haven't had true, authentic dim sum in....probably ten years.  Literally the best EVER, and it was so fun to introduce Kat to yet another super local Torontonian place (Rosewood will always have my heart when it comes to Chinatown Dim Sum).

Not pictured: like six other things, including bbq pork dumplings & the actual best sesame lotus paste dumplings I've EVER had.

Post-lunch we hoofed it the rest of the way to Ossington because BELLWOODS!  Got lucky enough to snag a couple spots at the bar where we partook in some Boogie Monster, Cat Lady, and split a Bounty Hunter. Mmmmm all the coconut.  I also bought beer for literally everyone I knew, which resulted in a street car ride back to the hotel rather than a 2.5 mile walk holding totes full of a case of bombers.

We cut it extra close on time, so we had to hop on the subway to take us back to the ACC, where we watched the Leafs eat it one last time for the season (super entertaining game though, plus my boyfriend Richard Panik was there), and then got to meet up at Jack Astor's with my lovely friend Bhavna who I honestly haven't seen in YEARS. Such a good time catching up and such a late night haha.  By the time we got back to the hotel & devoured ten pounds of trail mix, it was 2 am before we crawled into bed, which mean we did NOT in fact work out again the next morning (oops).

No salute-gate tonight ;)

Our beautiful reunion <3

Instead we went to Stockyards for breakfast!!  The red pepper citrus maple syrup was every bit as phenomenal as I remembered.  Leaving the city was depressing as always, but brightened by the fact that we had Nickelbrook Brewery to stop at on the way home, where we were served samples of literally everything that existed, and where a couple patrons told us to also stop at Railway City Brewing to buy some Dead Elephant, which I haven't sampled yet, but I heard is suuuuuper bitter/hoppy.

Nice haul....

The Zara haul <3 Plus a little Raptor pride!

And of course, the TRUE reason for going to Canada......

Every trip I take to Toronto feels painfully short and like I missed a thousand things I wanted to do, but it's such a short drive that I know I'm going to start going back far more often. If only because Bellwoods didn't have bottles of Witchshark for sale this time around ;)  And, bonus, next weekend is yet another trip to Austin!