Road Trips : Midwest Tour 2006 : Page Seven
Tuesday 24 October 2006:
I've really only mentioned it twice, but my tooth had been getting
a little worse for several days, and it peaked Monday night with me
sitting up in bed at about 3AM almost reduced to tears. I decided
that I had to do something about it, and that's how we spent our Tuesday
morning.
It was really pretty easy. We found an emergency dental clinic across from a graveyard on Yonge Street, and I got x-rays and a prescription for Vicodin and antibiotics within minutes. Canadian dentistry works much better than Canadian medical care, apparently, and my guess is that it's cheaper primarlily because most Canadians don't have dental plans, making the field rather competitive since people have to pay out of pocket.
Everyone I've heard from says that the whole "single payer" health plan in Canada leaves a lot to be desired. Ditto for the drug plan, which doesn't even exist unless you purchase a private plan or get one through your employer. As I found at the pharmacy, the drugs may be cheap, but the pharmacist's fee for dispensing them can be rather steep. My two presciptions were about four bucks each for the pills and ten bucks each for the "service charge".
Anyhow, I decided the pain was manageable and that I wasn't going to let my tooth ruin our trip. Unfortunately, Mark was pretty much feeling like death at this point as well. His stomach was a nightmare, he was feverish, and he had chills. We had lunch at a Harvey's in a rather bleak shopping center, took a short drive, and went back to the motel. With both of us in a sort of nether region of hell, we pretty much spent the rest of the day in our room, with him sleeping through most of it.
We did escape long enough to keep a dinner engagement with David and Jeremy, though. We must've seemed pretty pitiful, but we somehow managed to scarf down lots of Indian buffet before returning to the room to die.
Wednesday 25 October 2006:
Things were better today. We'd originally planned more of a pedestrian day, but we were both a little iffy about that now, so we did another long drive instead, around the periphery of the city and then back down the west side and along the lakeshore, having lunch at a Subway because we both needed a piss and it was handy.
Eventually, we made our way downtown to the CN Tower.
After descending from the 147th story (or "storey" as the Canadians type), we went back to the room before having one more nighttime drive followed by pizza from Pizza Pizza, because we couldn't get 967-1111 out of our heads after seeing it painted on every surface, building, and bench in town.
We both rather liked Toronto, especially knowing we were on sacred ground where Jane Jacobs had recently trod (trodden?).
Thursday 26 October 2006:
We took the long way out of Toronto before eventually getting on the QEW somewhere in the vicinity of Mississauga. It was the start of a very long drive that took us through Niagara Falls, across the border into Buffalo, and down to Pittsburgh, where we spent the night.
Along the way, Mark was impressed by how simple the border crossing was. I got to visit my first Wegman's. We both got to see Buffalo and decided that it was worthy of a later visit.
This being the fifth anniversary of the night we met, we also had our obligatory dinner at Denny's. This year is was at the location on the New York State Thruway service plaza just south of Buffalo. And if that doesn't sound romantic to you, then you don't know us very well.
Friday 27 October 2006:
After a quick drive through Pittsburgh and a quick breakfast at my favorite diner there, we hit the road for home. As is the case on most days like this, the excitement was largely gone and was replaced by the drudgery of driving. To make things more fun, it was pouring down rain all the way from Pittsburgh to Winston-Salem. We had dinner at a diner and Beckley, and we went home.
Drama aside, it was a great trip.