I accidentally walked a mile underneath Toronto before I figured out what a sign meant.
We’d gotten off the elevator on the concourse level of our hotel, thinking maybe there was a souvenir shop down there. An hour later, my daughter looked at my husband and me and whispered, “I feel like we’re not supposed to be here.”
There was a second, small and quiet, where I felt a flicker of anxiety. I’m supposed to be the mom who knows where we’re going. Hi, travel advisor, that’s kind of my job. But this one caught me off guard: no plan, no idea where the next turn led, and I didn’t want to raise her anxiety along with mine. It’s funny, because it’s the exact thing I tell my clients: the best-laid plans aren’t always the great ones, and sometimes you just have to pivot and trust the place you’re standing in. Still, the control freak in me does not love flying blind. I want to know where my next meal is coming from, thank you very much. But there’s a difference between not knowing and not feeling safe, and this wasn’t that. It was just clean, and quiet, and strange, and a little bit funny that the woman whose whole job is knowing where she’s going got a little lost like a tourist.
I’ll get to that one. It ended up being the coolest thing that every city needs to adopt, but in the meantime…
Casa Loma
We drove straight from London into Toronto and went right to Casa Loma, tickets already in hand, because it made sense to knock it out early before the day got hot. Pulling up, I kept turning around to my daughter, asking if she knew where we were and what castle this was. She’s a Marvel kid through and through, and we’d just watched X-Men together, so I was sure it would click. I fed her every clue I could think of, practically narrating the plot back to her, waiting for the lightbulb.
It didn’t. Turns out knowing a movie was filmed somewhere and actually recognizing the somewhere are two very different skills for a kid. She didn’t care that a superhero movie was filmed there. What she cared about was that her mom knew she loved castles and fairy tales, and that we were doing something that felt like it was pulled straight out of one, together as a family. That was the moment, and I almost missed it chasing the one I thought I wanted her to have. It’s a good reminder, as a parent, that we build up all these expectations of what we think will excite our kids, and then they hand us back something smaller and truer instead. You have to let go of the version you scripted and hold onto the one they’re actually living.
The castle itself is enormous in a way that’s hard to prepare for. Corridors lead into more corridors. Spiral staircases dump you into rooms you didn’t know were there. There’s a tunnel underneath the whole property connecting to the stables, and by the time we’d worked our way through turrets, viewing points, secret passages, and hallways that doubled back on themselves, we’d been walking the better part of a day. The fun part…July, in a heat dome, and there’s no air conditioning. At this point in our family vacation journey, it feels less like bad luck and more like our tradition.
We always go out for a fancy dinner, a museum, something to learn while we’re there, and every single time, the weather tests us. I recall having our dog with us as we visited a museum out of town, and she behaved like a well-mannered little companion, but actually she is a sixty-pound lab mix who adored the rug in the entryway the entire time while we perused the exhibits. Then there’s the time we went camping the one week that lined up with my husband’s job, figuring it’d be quiet, and it rained the week before, rained the week after, and sat directly under a heat dome the week we were actually there. That’s just us. I’ve made my peace with it. Everybody’s family traditions look a little different, and ours apparently involves sweating through everything memorable. The hotel was nice and frosty, with the AC working, waiting for us that night. More than I can say for some of our trips, and I mean that with love and a little bit of trauma.
A City Outside Our Window
We checked in, dropped off our bags, and went for a walk before dinner. Our hotel put us right in the middle of everything downtown, and during World Cup season in a host city, it was abuzz. Outside our window was an Arabic cultural festival filling the plaza in front of city hall, complete with music, dancing, and families in traditional dress gathered around a massive outdoor stage. At the same time, kids ran laps between the food stalls. The feeling you get by being near something that pulls that many different people toward the same thing at the same time remains indescribable.
This was the recurring scene visiting Toronto and Ontario in general: Arabic, Hispanic, Black, Asian, English, just people who clearly held ties from every corner of the world, all just moving through the same streets like it was nothing because to them, it was nothing. It was just a Friday night. Nobody performing anything for anybody. I wanted my daughter to feel this in her bones, because I want her to always feel like she belongs. I know there will be plenty of moments in her life where she doesn’t, where she gets stereotyped for who she is or what she’s into, and I can’t stop all of those. But I can give her a room where she’s just another person in it, not the only one who looks like her, not the one who stands out. A rainbow in front of her instead of a mirror with one reflection in it. That matters to me more than almost anything else we build our trips around.
Some of that comes from my own upbringing. I grew up around a good mix of people and still didn’t always feel like I fit with them. Our interests didn’t line up, our households didn’t look the same, and there was this small handful of us who were somewhere in between, close enough to relate but different enough to notice it. I could still look at someone and go, ” Hey, I see you,” let me help you out, because we had that in common even when nothing else matched. My daughter is growing up in a very different arrangement than my mom did, in that the way we each learned to navigate a room is different, and I don’t think that generational shift gets talked about enough inside multiracial families. There’s this invisible dividing line of kids from the same neighborhood sitting together at lunch, and the one kid who isn’t from that neighborhood getting shut out on both sides, not fully claimed by one group and not fully accepted by the other. That kid ends up building their own community from scratch. I wish it worked differently. Which is exactly why walking through Toronto and feeling everything mixed together, all the time, without anyone performing their difference or defending it, felt like the wish coming to life.
Niagara, and Being One of Four Americans
The next day we took a tour out to Niagara Falls, which I’m almost embarrassed to admit we’d never seen before. The Canadian side has this strange, mini-Vegas-on-steroids energy — a giant skeleton perched over one of the attractions, a Ferris wheel rising behind the gorge, all of it sitting a short walk from the water, doing something genuinely enormous. Across the gorge you can see New York, and there’s a toll bridge right there where you could, in theory, drive into on a whim. Borders made me feel so strange and so small, compared to how big the water made everything else feel.
We did the boat ride out toward the base of the falls.
Ahem, wear the poncho.
Everyone tells you to wear the poncho, and in this case, everyone is right. I wore my poncho and STILL got wet with the mist coming at us from every direction until I couldn’t tell which way was up, laughing so hard I forgot to be annoyed about my wet pants. Afterward we walked the park along the water before catching our tour bus out to the whirlpools and the tidy but pretty Niagara-on-the-Lake.
On that bus, our guide mentioned, almost as an aside, that Toronto is home to something like 130 different languages spoken across the city. It tracked, because of everyone on our tour that day, we were one of only four American travelers. The rest were from Colombia, Pakistan, Montreal, France, London, and the list kept going. A little rolling cross-section of the entire world, all of us pointed at the same waterfall as if it belonged to everybody a little bit.
There’s a very specific ache that comes from being somewhere you’re not the majority. Not an uncomfortable ache. A clarifying one. At home, my default setting is just… the way it goes. This is how I am, this is what’s expected, this is the norm, and I don’t spend much time questioning it because I don’t have to. Getting knocked out of that for an afternoon made me realize my normal isn’t the normal; it’s just mine, and in that gap stands values. I want to be there for everyone. No discrimination, no bias I’m carrying in on purpose, because everybody I meet has something to teach me if I let them. I think that’s what actually makes you a good traveler, more than any airport or itinerary skill. I got a little emotional on that bus, sitting next to my daughter, looking at something enormous and beautiful, thinking about how lucky I am to keep collecting moments like this one. If I stopped experiencing new things tomorrow, I couldn’t say I never did anything. I could say I did some very full things. That’s the whole reason I keep pushing to go.
Underneath It All
Which brings me back to the beginning of this story. On checkout day, we got some coffee and decided to walk around a moment.
One hallway turned into another. Then another. We passed cafés, storefronts, office lobbies, people going about their quiet day beneath the city, as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world. My daughter said her line about not feeling as if we were supposed to be there, and we all laughed, because honestly, it did kinda feel that way, like we were walking around a secret. Every time we thought we’d hit the end, another corridor opened up.
We’d stumbled into PATH, Toronto’s underground pedestrian network, which we kept seeing signs for but had no idea what it actually was. It’s like a second city living beneath the first one, connecting hotels and office towers and shopping and transit stations through corridors that never once felt confusing, and are so well signed even though we had absolutely no idea where we were going the entire time. Coming from Michigan, it made instant sense to me. When winter shows up and reminds everyone by the Great Lakes exactly who’s boss, being able to cross downtown without stepping outside stops sounding like a novelty and starts sounding like somebody actually cared whether you made it through February.
That was the overall theme of the trip. Somebody built this city to show that people mattered. Not a slogan on a wall, a decision made over and over, in concrete and paint and glass. Wide transit lines. Walkable blocks. A whole hidden world built for exactly the kind of weather that makes you want to disappear indoors for four months.
Somebody sat down and thought about the people who’d have to live there, and it showed, everywhere, all at once.
