Visiting Toronto - A First Hand Account of a Vacation Over the Canadian Border

When our daughters returned from competing in a high school international music festival in Toronto, Canada, we heard for weeks about what a great city it was and what a wonderful time they had enjoyed. Raves from teens about potential family vacation spots need to be taken seriously. In due time and after many discussions, we decided to put their adolescent judgment to the test and planned a motor trip to Toronto. Beginning at our home in eastern Massachusetts , we traveled across the length of both Massachusetts and New York, stopped briefly at Niagara Falls and then pushed on to Toronto, Canada and the complete validation of the claims our daughters had made. In fact they were so right about visiting Toronto that even their teen aged brother was forced to extend kudos. Now that's a vacation.

1. How clean can a city be?. Our family has done a reasonable amount of traveling. Before taking our trip to Toronto, we had experienced visits to New York, Orlando, Chicago, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton National Park . In short we had already seen some sites. But in all our travels, Toronto was definitely the first place that we had visited where the overall cleanliness of the city was so noticeable and delightful that it even drew the attention of our teens.

There aren't a lot of cities in the U. S. where you can praise the amazing cleanliness of even tourist level hotel accommodations. Nor are there many public transit stations or transports that are so clean that they grab your attention. Even tourist areas seemed to us somehow miraculously attended to, with debris no where to be seen. There are a lot of things that determine how much you can enjoy a vacation in a major metropolitan area. For all of us, going to Toronto was a trip definitely enhanced by a cleanliness that seemed to respect both the residents and the tourists. You know a city is clean when your kids tell their friends they enjoyed the trip and then immediately start telling them about how clean the city is .