Canadian Thanksgiving

We got back to Toronto on Friday, happy to be back with our friends and staying at their house for the final weekend in Ontario. We mainly just did washing, got Adam (and ourselves) drunk, caught up with e-mails and chilled out with Amy and Max. It was nice to have a rest and relax before the next part of our trip, which will be quite full on, and where we won’t have the support of local friends to rely on.

Turned out, it was an important weekend for Canadians. Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 2nd Monday in October, and so we were invited over to Amy’s dad’s house to join their family for a traditional Thanksgiving feast. The tradition is, everyone eats till their tummies hurt, and then they eat some more. We were in heaven!

hungry and weary pilgrims eating the indigenous hosts out of house and home .. sound familiar?

Little did they know when they invited us into their home (a beautiful house in the Canadian style - detached, huge, comfortable - in a suburb of Toronto) that a] we are semi-professional eaters, and b] we have been eating very badly recently (mainly due to financial constraints - it’s hard to find decent healthy and cheap food on the road particularly when you’ve nowhere to cook).

Anyway, we had seconds of everything, got spoiled with rare single malt whiskey (Amy’s dad James is Scottish and has a fantastic collection) and the kids got Halloween gifts and sweets from Amy’s step-mum Barbara. They were amazingly kind hosts (even giving us tupperware full of leftovers as we left) and we most definitely gave thanks for our good fortune and generous friends.