Day 7: Niagara Falls and Toronto Road Trip

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Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Allan Gardens Conservatory, Yonge Street Continued

Exterior of Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Toronto, ON, Canada

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Allan Gardens Conservatory • Yonge Street Continued

ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM (ROM)

This day started out overcast with rain in the forecast throughout the day, so spending time inside a museum worked out well for the weather.

Both my husband and I are more into art museums, we’re especially interested in paintings, but we will sometimes visit multi faceted museums like the ROM. Neither of us had high expectations for this museum, but we, mainly I, enjoyed our time there for the most part. My husband was getting bored in some parts of the museum, but he waited patiently as I checked out some parts of the museum that interested me.

Admission for the ROM is included in the Toronto CityPASS, but you do have to reserve the date, not a specific time of day, for the day you will be visiting. The reservations can easily be made, and changed, in the CityPASS app (though I don’t know if some dates get booked out causing it to not be possible to make or change reservations for certain dates.)

If you are not using the Toronto CityPASS for your admission, it might be helpful to know that pricing for admission to the ROM is based on the date you visit. See this link for more information on that.

You are allowed to leave the museum and return the same day as long as you have your admission ticket.

Click here for maps and tours information for the ROM.

Click here for information on where the ROM is located, how to get there with various forms of transportation and where to park. (We parked a few minutes down the street in a parking garage that we had reserved a spot at by using Spot Hero.)

We entered the museum around 11:15 a.m. The first thing we checked out was a dinosaur section.

Next we visited a gallery dedicated to artifacts from China, including Chinese architecture. As of this writing, the ROM houses “the largest collection of Chinese architectural artifacts outside of China.”

Then we visited an area about insects and arachnids, which was quite interesting. If you’re interested in entomology, the Smithsonian (in Washington D.C.) has “one of the largest entomological collections in the world.” (I really enjoyed visiting that one many years ago.)

The Gallery of Birds had some beautiful birds on display. There was a woman with her young son in the owl section when we were there and she was terrified of the owls, especially one, so she left the room in fear. Though some owls can have a frightful appearance, these ones are all dead, so I appreciated the opportunity to look at them fairly close up, though it’s sad that they’re dead.

The next areas we visited were about mammals, sea life and reptiles. I had my husband stand next to a couple of the displays to give scale to the size of those particularly large living creatures.

The next section of the museum was about furniture and decoration styles. Some of the Art Nouveau pieces and pieces continuing on into the 1960s were really neat looking, IMO.

Next we entered an area that I took tons of photos in – a gallery of vases and other similar items throughout the millenniums. Some of the pieces were so beautiful! There are, of course, vases ranging in size from very small to much larger. And, of course, vases of varying materials are on display as well as a lovely variety of finishes – some of the iridescent ones were so striking.

Though there was more to see, we decided to leave after visiting the section with vases. Below are three photos I took of parts of the interior of the museum that show how parts of the ROM look.

After leaving the ROM we walked to nearby Bloor St W and walked down Philosopher’s Walk. This area is said to be lovely when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, but they were not, so, though it is a nice looking area, it wasn’t anything special that time of year.

I had originally planned on us visiting the nearby Queen’s Park and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario building at the end of that park. I had some other things planned after that as well, including walking to and exploring the Yorkville neighborhood, but unfortunately it was raining off and on, so we decided to skip those parts of the plan and instead walk to our car and head to Alan Gardens.

With our change of plans, from the end of Philosopher’s Walk, we walked back to our car. The photos below are of Philosopher’s Walk and our walk back to our car.

I had originally planned on us walking over to and eating lunch at Okonami House Restaurant to try their Japanese pancakes (which look and sound delicious!), but because we left the area near the ROM early due to the rain, we decided to eat bánh mì in our car that we had packed in our cooler.

ALLAN GARDENS CONSERVATORY

Next we drove to park near Allan Gardens Conservatory. Allan Gardens is free to visit. It has five greenhouses, each with a different theme. The greenhouses are Arid, Tropical, Palm, Orchid and Bromelia, and Temperate.

It was raining and we had to walk through some muddy grass to get to the greenhouses, but it was worth the muddy trek.

One of the greenhouses has turtles in a water feature area. I put a couple photos of that in the first photo gallery below.

I have divided the photos into two galleries because I took so many photos. There are quite a few photos I’m not sharing here so that I don’t bore anyone with too many photos, which I possibly have, but hopefully haven’t, done already! Sorry if I have!

And now for photo gallery number two for Allan Gardens Conservatory.

Outside of Allan Gardens Conservatory is a nice looking area.

I had planned on us visiting Cabbage Town and then walking from there to Wanaag Restaurant Somali Grill and Cafe, which has great reviews stating the food, portions and prices are all good. But the rain would not let up, so we decided instead to drive to Chinatown to get dinner.

My husband was craving bún bò huế and I really wanted to go back to Juicy Dumpling to get their fried mini soup dumplings because I enjoyed them so much two days prior. We decided to go their first, then go to a Vietnamese restaurant that my husband wanted to go to.

It’s strange to me how something can be so crazy delicious one day, and then I get the same thing another time and even though it tastes the same I’m just not as crazy about it as I was before. That’s what happened with these dumplings. They were still tasty, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as I had two days prior.

You can see more photos of Juicy Dumpling by going to day five of this travel story and jumping to the Chinatown section. Below is one photo of my dinner for this day.

Now that my tummy was full, we walked over to Kim Vietnamese Restaurant to get my husband’s dinner. Though he was craving bún bò huế, once he got there he saw duck Pho on the menu and decided to get that instead. He thought it was good. The woman serving us was kind.

When we left Kim Vietnamese Restaurant we found that the rain was finally starting to let up. Yay! Rainy days are nice if I’m indoors, but they’re not so great for vacation days where we’re walking around a lot outside. Fortunately we had avoided a lot of the rain by doing indoor activities that day.

YONGE STREET CONTINUED

After dinner we drove over to Yonge Street to walk farther up it than we had the previous day.

We went back into CF Toronto Eaton Centre to get more chocolates from Purdys Chocolatier. While we were there we went to the food court at the bottom level of the mall and my husband got some food from one of the Chinese counter service restaurants.

Yonge Street was livelier Friday evening compared to when we were there earlier in the evening the previous day.

We came across Chungchun Rice Dog. We have been wanting to try a rice dog for awhile, and we finally tried one there! Chungchun specializes in Korean-style hotdogs. They started in South Korea, and they now have locations all over the world.

At Chungchun you decide what type of rice dog you want, which topping(s) and which sauces and seasonings. We got the original with spicy mayo and it was fantastic! It’s a fun snack or meal. We’ve since gone back to one of the ones in Montreal and tried other rice dogs. We’ve been happy with all of the ones we’ve tried.

The photo gallery below is of the portion of Downtown Yonge Street that we walked this day. There’s a nice combination of old and new architecture, with several restaurants offering various cuisines.

On the way back to our car we came across this quaint park that was right next to the parking garage we parked at. The park is called James Canning Gardens. It’s nothing extra special, but it’s a nice little, quiet park (at least quiet when we were there) in the middle of a bustling city. I thought it looked nice how the colors in the sky from the setting sun look at the end of one of the photos as a backdrop to the park.

After getting to our car we drove back to our hotel to end another fun day.

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