All I know, is we were out having a nice dinner and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child came up.  Here in the States, it is being performed in New York and in California.  Then it was mentioned that it is being performed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  Immediately, I was the only one not feverishly punching away on a cell phone getting information.  It turns out that the last performance was going to be on 2 July 2023 and of course that is a holiday weekend, as 1 July is Canada Day.  I really didn’t think everything would fall into place, but it did.  Though on the drive up, we stopped at a restaurant and they had a red wine, and a white wine.  They did know how to make a Run and Cola.  We arrived late enough to unpack and drink some “house” wine that my Bride had packed, and I have written about too many times, but she is a creature of habit, when she finds something that she loves.    

We were staying at an Airbnb, which brought terror into my heart.  I guess I am old school and I like to stay at a hotel, and I also like to have everything preplanned.  My idea of roughing it, is a Holiday Inn, and here we were staying at someone’s condo, I guess in a building that doesn’t condone such enterprises, with designated parking spots designed for a Mini Cooper, instead of the Mini Van that the four of us were traveling in.  Luggage and all the other stuff that my Bride brought had to be unpacked and three of us had to get out before the vehicle could be parked, with just enough room for the driver to extricate himself. Our ensuite bedroom had a jacuzzi tub, next to an open toilet and there was a shower that we both had to enter sideways in and out of and no hand rails especially stepping out onto wet marble flooring.  A risk manager would have a field day with this, come to think of it, the immortal Willie Gingrich would have thought he died and went to heaven, he would have been able to stop chasing ambulances forever.

The next morning, we had breakfast in the condo, some sort of micro-wave individualized quiche bites and Mimosas.  Me, the fellow that likes to know what is going on and likes to have things planned out, was flying by the seat of his pants.  All I know was that later on in the day we would be using public transportation, which is basically unknown in the Detroit, the “Car Capital of the World.”  In Chicago, we would use the “El” to travel from the airport and get off at the river and walk two blocks to our hotel, and then walk or take cabs, until we left. The three others left in the morning to go shopping with the van, to a mall that was closed by the time we had arrived in Toronto, the night before.  The women came back with new purses, who knew?  My Bride is getting younger every day, as she bought a very trendy robin’s egg leather backpack.  I stayed home and finished the Mimosas and contemplated taking street cars, without really any true map to fall back on.  The magic of Harry Potter was surrounding us.