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 primarily 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.

Toronto just works. That’s the best way I know to describe it. It’s unlike any city of its size in the US. To begin with, there don’t seem to be any really dicey, scary neighborhoods. Some are better than others, to be sure, but I didn’t feel nervous anyplace we went, and we pretty much went everywhere. That wouldn’t be the case in an American city of two million people.

 

While Toronto is a very dense place focused on transit and pedestrians, it also manages to be very car-friendly. Driving was generally not all that unpleasant, except in a few specific neighborhoods. There are mile after mile of tightly-packed commercial districts of the sort I’d call “1920s streetcar strips” just like in Chicago, but they all seem more healthy and in tune with the neighborhood, with stores that residents would actually shop in.

Granted, it sometimes lacked the little “surprises” you see in Chicago, where the streetscape is interrupted by some infill from the 1950s or later. I always like these areas because they break up the monotony, but lots of people disagree on that.

There also seemed to be none, or very little, of the classic American suburbanization patterns of the 1950s. Apparently, while we were focused on individual ranch houses in sprawling suburbs, Canada was building dense suburban highrises that probably did much more to fix the postwar housing crisis than Levittown did. Unfortunately, these peripheral highrises apparently haven’t aged well, and many now house only those residents who are too poor to move someplace more appealing.

  

After being fortified with breakfast from a diner on Bloor Street, and after stopping at Wal-Mart for videotapes, we pretty much did the length of Yonge Street, and more. Mark got a Tim Horton’s fix. After covering large portions of the city, we made our way to the massive Loblaws at Queens Quay (because that’s what I do) and to dinner at a really cool old-style Chinese place with a moat and a bridge. Alas, I noticed that my tooth was getting more and more sensitive when I had my very hot soup.

 

Too many doughnuts too early in the morning precluded our obligatory visit to Lafayette Coney Island on the way out of Detroit, so we crossed the border into Canada without mystery meat in our systems.

Border towns are pretty much dumps everywhere in North America, and Windsor is no exception. While Canada is almost universally “nice”, it’s as if creeping blight from Detroit had come across the Ambassador Bridge and tried to get its clutches into western Ontario as well, with some limited success. Windsor is much “nicer” than its neighbor to the north (yes, in this particular area, one travels north into the US) but it’s not exactly a model Canadian city.

We stopped at a supermarket to use our ATM card for cash back in Canadian funds and realized that, by and large, this feature only worked with Canadian ATM cards. US cards, most of which have Mastercard or Visa logos, apparently only function as credit cards there. So much for cheap cash withdrawals.

  

Despite all that, I was excited to be driving across Ontario for the first time. My previous trips to Canada had consisted on one trip to Montreal for the World’s fair in 1967 (at age 3), a day trip to Victoria BC in 1974 (age 10), a day trip to Toronto in 1979 (age 15), and assorted quick runs to Windsor and Niagara Falls over the years. I was looking forward to spending a few days there and seeing what things were really like.

And what they’re really like is “expensive”. It was not the greatest time to be in Canada on US dollars. But we travel cheaply, so it was OK.

For lunch, we stopped at a little diner in downtown Chatham. I was intrigued to see that a little town like Chatham had a giant, new Sears store downtown. I assumed it had originally been an Eaton’s, as had many Sears stores in this part of Canada.

Over the next few days, we’d see more examples of how downtowns never seem to have died the slow, agonizing death in Canada that they faced in the US during the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, there are suburbs and freeway development, but the cities and towns still seem relatively centralized. Maybe that’s because the freeways (the 401, at least) don’t really go into most of the towns but more around them at some distance from the core. The interstate highway system in the US was supposed to do this as well, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

We drove around London a bit as well, crossing the Thames and everything, and hit and A&P and a Wal-Mart (which probably used to be a Woolco), and finally made our way into Toronto at about 7:00. We checked into our hotel on Queen Street in the East Beaches area, and were surprised by how nice it was: a big, cheap room in a nice area.

We had dinner at the Tulip, a diner-type place down the street, and then went for a night drive trough the streets of Toronto, which promised to be a rather amazing city. My tooth was starting to hurt a little, though.

  

After breakfast at a coffee shop on Woodward Avenue in some suburb, we headed into Detroit. It’d been eight years since my last visit, and I was without a tour guide this trip, so I fear I may have been too nervous to show Mark any of the really heavy-duty decay. It is, however, still there, if a little harder to find because of “gentrification” downtown and demolition elsewhere.

To make things more interesting, we just happened to arrive the day the first game of the World Series was being played in the new Comerica Stadium downtown, so the whole area seemed disorientingly occupied.

The Book-Cadillac Hotel is apparently being converted into condos. I’ll believe it when I see it. While there seems to be a lot of money flowing into downtown Detroit right now, I have my doubts that it will stick, or that it will even continue flowing. It all seems a little forced to me.

   

There’s even a Borders downtown now in the Compuware Center, a new building in the middle of a sea of abandoned skyscrapers dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. It has a nice parking garage where we were able to get some great pictures — and park for free.

 

After downtown, we drove out Michigan Avenue to Dearborn and circled back across the northern border, covering the whole length of 8-Mile Road. I made my annual pilgrimage to whatever A&P-owned store I was near (Farmer Jack in this case) to pick up some Jane Parker fruitcakes for my uncle.

Back in Detroit, we visited what was left of Brush Park, an amazing area of Victorian mansions which was in serious decay ten years ago, and is now almost nonexistant. Apparently, whichever houses can be rehabbed are being rehabbed, but there’s just not much left to work with.

We did some more driving in the evening before having dinner at an Olive Garden in Dearborn.

As luck would have it, the day dawned sunny, which finally allowed me to take some decent photos.

Morning brought a southbound tour of Western Avenue, a stop in The Loop, a northbound tour of Lincoln Avenue, and then a southbound exit from the city just as rush hour was beginning. We departed via Lakeshore Drive and through a relatively safe chunk of the south side. I’d love to see more of the southside, but with a guide who knows his way around.

I realized upon leaving Chicago that most of my best stuff was shot on video as we drove through the never-ending commercial strips and neighborhoods of the city. One of the things I love most about Chicago (and one that’s hard to capture with a still camera) is the very “old meets new” texture of the city, where a hundred-year-old streetcar strip may very well contain a 1970s shopping center with a Kmart (or a Googie coffee shop or a motel) in its midst. The whole city has grown organically rather than by way of a master plan, and it’s urban in a way that most “new urban” complexes can never be.

Anyway, our drive from Chicago to Detroit was pretty uneventful. I’m pretty sure we ate someplace, but I have no idea where.