Day 244 in 2022

Stratford day 1: Hamlet and Chicago

Days 241-244 in 2019 (Stratford!)

Stratford is a tradition in our family. This adorable city in Ontario, Canada, is home to an annual, summer-long Shakespeare Festival that is just really great theater (sorry, theatre). My one high school trip and a couple of childhood trips of Jon's nontwithstanding, we first attended the festival in 2012. That year Calvin and I tagged along when Jon gave pedagogy lectures in New York and Ontario. Along the way we took in sites like the Christmas Story house, Niagara Falls, and, for our last trick, a showing of The Pirates of Penzance in Stratford. Calvin was six at the time, and he loved it. They had booster seats for the kids and wine in sippy cups for the parents, and the show was wonderfully engaging and professional. We were hooked. 

In the years since we have discovered a favorite family-owned motel (As You Like It Motel), and a favorite place for ice cream (Jenn and Larry's). We have enjoyed countless pool days, walks along the river, strolls through the city shops, and dips into the small Saturday art show. Though we started with just one show a year, that quickly became two, and then graduated to three. After the Pirates of Penzance; we have seen Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Nights Dream; Alice Through the Looking Glass; The Sound of Music; As You Like It; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; Treasure Island; The Tempest; The Music Man; and To Kill a Mockingbird. We have attended some pre-show family meal entertainments (like lunch with Alice), and even once received a very special, very private, backstage tour of the Festival Theatre.

Obviously, we love our annual trip to Stratford, but this year there was even more to love when we got to share the experience with more of our family. And because it was the big family experience, we did more days, more plays, and had more fun altogether. We were gifted with beautiful weather, luck with parking, and really great seats for really great shows. 

Day 241: The Neverending Story and The Merry Wives of Windsor, plus pizza by the pool

Day 242: Billy Elliot (perfect for our dancing boy), plus ice cream after dinner

Day 243: an afternoon in town, followed by an evening of Othello

Day 243: Henry VIII for some of us, pool and play for the others, followed by dinner in town

Photos 180-182/365 (series: Stratford!)

One of our favorite places to visit: Stratford, home of Canada's annual Shakespeare Festival. This is another family tradition going on seven years now, including the best old style motel with pool, Shakespeare and musicals, and ice cream every day from the sweetest little shop in town. This year the weather was perfect for swimming, and that's about it, other than seeing shows inside an air conditioned theater, that is. With a daily heat index in the triple digits (yes, even in Canada!), we weren't doing much of our usual wandering around town. Our 2018 line up? Shakespeare's Tempest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Music Man. 

Pools, gardens, ducks, and lions (a circuitous journey to Stratford)

We are just back from our final summer trip, and the last of our traditional it-isn't-summer-without-it trips: Stratford. Only this year it was a little different. Jon was headed in that direction to present his company's summer lecture series in a few different towns, and rather than have him go and come and go again, we tagged along with him for his week of work preceding our weekend theater tickets. This was a new thing for us, and one which required a lot of planning and a little getting used to. Let's just say that to make a tagalong trip successful, one really only need add pools.

Yes, throughout the week, while Jon was busy presenting to adoring masses of piano teachers (autographs are a common request, I kid you not), Calvin and I were busy becoming hotel pool connoisseurs. This was where the planning came in, because we had to make sure that the hotels Jon booked had pools to begin with, then we had to organize our time so that Calvin and I could take advantage of said pools while Jon worked, keeping in mind check-out times. It ended up with Calvin and I showering, throwing things in suitcases, and dashing out of hotel rooms just before the noon bell chimed, only to spend the next hour lounging in the lobby on our suitcases, eating lunches packed from the family cooler. It was a nifty system, once we got the hang of it, which was, oh, about Jon's last day of presentations.

So pool connoisseurs we have become, but we also made good use of travel time between cities, for though Jon was working, we ended up spending his family time in the afternoons, sight-seeing on the road, and reserving the evenings and nights (and mornings, of course) for work. Like I said, we really got our stuff together by about the last day, but we had a good time doing it, and we saw a lot of things—cities, and pools, and gardens, and shacks, and pools, and rain showers, and sunshine, and did I mention pools? All on our way to one of our favorite summer destinations: Stratford.

There were a lot of stops, and there are a lot of pictures (many from the phone this time, too, because so often I found myself in a place where I never expected to want pictures, then was glad to have the phone—which is good, because that's why we got it).

Day one is always the worst: the most driving combined with the most eagerness and the most impatience. That, and we got a little lost in Windsor when the money exchange was closed (how on earth do they expect people to spend money in their nightclub dives without a money exchange???), but we got it together eventually, then rewarded ourselves with root beer floats at a rest area (note to U.S. road commission: get A&Ws in the rest areas stat).

Day two saw a lot more action. Pool notes first: pool number one was warm and was a great size, but it was in the hotel basement and felt a little secluded. 

After swimming all morning we did our first shower-and-pack dash, then ate lunch and read in the lobby. It was actually kind of relaxing. Toronto was less so, but since we've become regular visitors to Chicago, we didn't find the city as taxing as some might. We found the CN Tower almost as underwhelming as the beer at the Steam Whistle Brewing, but enjoyed the trains at the Toronto Railway Museum.

Day three. The pool was actually pretty great, except that two hours of the morning it was being used for swim aerobics and water workouts for the (elderly? geriatric? local old folks?). We were still welcome to partake of the pool's wateryness, but there wasn't any room for us to swim, so instead we hung out in the deep end, getting a kick out of the collected grumpiness that filled the rest of the pool.

The afternoon was more successful. After our lunch/reading time in the hotel lobby, we all stopped at the Royal Botanical Gardens where we found bees, chipmunks, and a long dead and burried horse, but not as many flowers as one might expect. We stopped at three of their garden sites and their quaint tea house before heading to our final pre-Stratford stop, London (where our hotel looked delightfully like a castle).

Day four. The best pool yet, in part because it was really three pools in a fun atrium setting, but also because we stayed two nights there, so we had two full mornings to swim. Plus the hotel, in addition to being awesome because it looked like a castle, had a fascinating interior, including putt putt golf.

An added benefit of our castle hotel was its downtown London location, which allowed us to go for afternoon and evening walks between rainshowers. 

Day five: probably our best day outside of Stratford. On day five we enjoyed the castle hotel pool one last time before shoving off for the Fanshawe Pioneer Village. This is a quaint collection of old buildings (and some replicas), assembled roughly in the order of a timeline, yet somehow also in the shape of a town. We started off at a mid-1800s log cabin and moved through several other buildings from that era before entering the late 1800s, then the early 1900s. Along the way we saw demonstrations of varying sorts—blacksmith, wood working, sheep, an osprey, even a groundhog (okay, those last three weren't exactly demonstrations). We also met a period actor who was delighted to know that we were enjoying ourselves, even as frequenter visitors of Greenfield Village, and we got to see real live Indian Runner Ducks. We had a great time. I have only one warning: don't bother with the food.

Day five was also Jon's first day of actual vacation, and the day that we finally arrived in Stratford. It's hard for me to explain or describe our love affair with this town. The natives there are short of friendly, everything is overpriced, and getting service anywhere is difficult. But over the years we've come to look forward to our time there, staying in the family-owned motel with the perfectly quaint breakfasts, going for walks along the man-made "Avon" and talking to all the entitled water fowl, eating hand-dipped soft serve like you've never had anywhere else at Jenn & Larry's, and, of course, taking in the expertly produced plays (this year? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and As You Like It).

can you spot the two baby bunnies in the open grass?










wine sippy cups at intermission...

Wherefore art thou now? Stratford

This really is starting to sound like a travel (b)log, but we're home now, and as I type Jon is in the next room trying to fix the vacuum while Calvin is cavorting in the yard with the rest of the neighborhood hooligans, so I'd say we've finally returned to normal. The laundry is even done.

A few years ago we journeyed through Stratford (Canada, because one does not simply journey through Stratford, England from Michigan) and stopped to see The Pirates of Penzance on the way. It was delightful. The entire experience was delightful, except that the one day was too short. So last year we did it again, seeing Midsummer Nights Dream, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and adding an extra night. The second trip was even more delightful—we discovered Jenn and Larry's Ice Cream shop, after all, but ran into trouble finding anything more substantial to eat (reservations are a must, everything is overpriced, nothing is foodie style...it's a sore subject).

Then this year we practically perfected the trip. We have our favorite place to stay nailed down, and we visited Jenn and Larry's every day (which doesn't go unnoticed by the owners of a small time shop), and we mostly figured out how to handle meals. For us that meant forgetting about the persnickety restaurants on the main drag and bringing pizza home to the hotel so we could play in the pool. The only thing wanting this year was the weather, but after the camping trip we just had, who's complaining? It was warm enough to swim for at least twenty minutes before blue-lip syndrome set in, not so hot that walking along the river in dress clothes elicited a sweat, and just rainy enough to make things interesting in the evenings. We never even needed our umbrella, but I will say that our Dark Sky App has really come in handy these past couple of weeks.

This year we saw The Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Sound of Music. The first was as spartan as the second was extravagant, and thankfully we saw them in that order, because I imagine doing it the other way around would have been a serious let down. We also were given a very special, two-hour private tour of the Festival Theater, a rare treat that was probably the highlight of the whole trip. Well, that and the ice cream.

Housekeeping had a really good time arranging Calvin's menagerie while we were out...