Things to do before I leave Ontario - part 2

I attended the Canadian Warplane Heritage FlyFest 07 on Sunday. I always try to make the Toronto Air Show, but since we'll be in Nova Scotia this year I thought it fitting to go to the source. The CWH project is located beside Hamilton Airport. It now has a new building, complete with Holland Liberation Canteen and a Gift Shop. More importantly, it houses Aviation history. There are projects on-going that you can actually observe in development. There are displays - both static and interactive. There are people to talk to who are passionate about Canadian warplanes (and even about Trainers and Helicopters).

The FlyFest was a day of flights by the B25, Lancaster (one of only 2 flight worthy planes that remain), P-51 Mustang, DC-3, PBY, and Spitfire. It was awesome to see these WWII machines in flight.

View more pictures here.

For those of you south of the border

Here's the gas price map for the US, together with the Canadian map from the previous post. The East seems to be doing fairly well, while the West is really taking a beating. Here's the interactive version of the map.

BTW - the maps don't quite fit together - see the Lake Ontario area. Not sure what happened there, but it gives a good idea of the difference between regions.

While we're on the subject of travelling

Toronto, and Southern Ontario in general, have been on about gas prices since they hit .50 a litre. A little research shows that this is the spot in Canada that has the least to complain about. It turns out that even Alberta has higher gas prices than Southern Ontario. Go figure.

For a closer look at the map above go here. BTW - Nova Scotia has legistation in place to stabilize the price of gas. In the Halifax area it currently sits at 114.1 per litre, and searching for cheap gas is a waste of time because all of the stations are the same price (with the occassional exception where it's 114.9).

So, as we leave Ontario we get a much clearer sense of why the rest of the country views it the way they do. Who would complain about cheaper gas than anywhere else, cheaper groceries (3 litres of milk in Halifax is 6.91. In Toronto it's around 4.00), and higher wages? It's all relative to what you're used to, I suppose.

It may come down to supply and demand, a dedicated infrastructure, lower distribution costs, and a tighter population density but it doesn't change the raw numbers one bit. Ontario is a less expensive place to live, if you take out the cost of housing and the fact that you have to drive over an hour to work (the average commute into the city for a person working in Toronto was just calculated at 79 minutes). Other than that what's to complain about? This?

What would you do if you were leaving in 3 months?

Looking at the next few months we realized that there may be some things we'd like to do in Ontario before we leave. When you live somewhere you don't always enjoy all of the things that the area has to offer. Agawa Canyon near Sault Ste. Marie for example. Or a weekend at Niagara-on-the-lake on a bike tour of the wineries. Or a weekend on Manitoulin Island.

What would you do if you were moving to another part of the country, or the world?