Car Breakdown!! (Day 5) 9/13/09

Sunday September the 13th, 2009 AD, started out as a normal morning. We ate breakfast, came upstairs and cleaned up a bit, and left in the car towards downtown to see the CN Tower. We made it about 3/4s of the way there, and as we were obliviously driving down a straight part of the expressway, the unexpected happened...

Most of our car's warning lights and the master warning signal suddenly turned on, a buzzer sounded and the main Hybrid system screen began quickly switching between 3 warning screens for the VSC, SRS airbags and Hybrid system, each instructing us to pull over immediately and contact a dealer. All of course, on a Sunday.

We took the next exit and pulled the car over to the shoulder, which happened to be a junction in the Terry Fox Cancer Research Run. I quickly jumped out of the car to look under the car for something like a boulder stuck to the transmission. Not the case. We looked through the vehicle manual and learned that the VSC system is Vehicle Stability Control, how to mount the car to a Tow truck and about 2 dozen reasons to stop driving if any of these warning lights turned on. So, of course, we drove the car across Toronto to our hotel.

With a stroke of luck, we made it safely back to the hotel and extended our reservations (we were scheduled to leave that day for Algonquin Provincial Park) We located a Toyota dealership, after all, we were in the biggest city in Canada. It was fortunately only a couple kilometres (yes, kilometres) from our hotel, but it was closed on Sundays so we had to kill a day.

Since our car was inaccessible, we decided to use the Toronto Subway (yes, the underground train, not the sandwich chain) to commute downtown to do our touristy things. We went to the CN Tower (Pictures up later) and took the slightly ominous elevator up the building that was the largest in the world for decades. Up at the middle observatory, we took a couple pix and pranced around the glass floor. We then prepared for the Skypod, which does not play music.

The CN Tower Skypod is apparently the world's tallest observatory, at ~447 metres. We took a cramped elevator (roughly 4' x 8' and with about 10 people in it) up, and gasped at the view. The amazing thing about this observatory is that you can see both straight out over Lake Ontario, and straight down below you, giving it a very dizzying effect. We took several photos, and then got back in line for the elevator down. (Dad began to get queasy from the swaying, which tops out at 1 meter at 120 mph winds.)

We walked back to the Subway, took it back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day primarily doing Spanish and looking for a coffee place that is open past 5:00 on a Sunday.