Ash had booked us into the revolving restaurant at the top of the CN Tower for dinner on the last night of the holiday. We got suitably dressed up — lo tops instead of Birkenstocks; cords instead of jeans — and walked down to the shore through Chinatown and then the shiny, concrete downtown.

We were ushered into the lift at the CN Tower by an almost catatonically bored attendant. “Welcome to the CN Tower, bienvenue à la Tour CN, Canada’s national tower and the world’s tallest freestanding structure on land,” she monotoned, “We will shortly be ascending at a rate of 20 feet per second to the main restaurant floor at a height of 351 metres. Please do not lean against the doors lest they open unexpectedly and cause you to fall to a messy death, where you will hit the ground travelling at up to 80 metres per second depending on height of departure from the elevator. CN Tower Inc. does not accept liability for any injuries arising from uncontrolled vertical descent, fiery death in inescapably enclosed spaces at altitudes, or acute myocardial infarction resulting from surprise at the bewildering height at which it is possible to order a 1985 Châteauneuf-du-Pape chilled to a climate-controlled 9°C. Thank you for listening, and please enjoy your time spent in awe at man’s folly, hubris and phallic insecurity.”

Well, it was something like that anyway. I was too busy swallowing hard and gripping the handrail in an attempt to control my twirling stomach to pay all that much attention. The lift slid up through the darkness of the radome and then emerged into the flatteringly dimmed lights of the restaurant. We were ushered to our table right up at the window and warned not to leave anything on the ledge. “The floor moves, but not the window,” explained the waiter. “People wonder where their coats have gone.” I plumped for the out-and-out fatboy menu, running through five courses from amuse bouche to defibrillating coffee and we sat back to take it all in.

From up so high, Toronto has a very cyberpunk/Ghost in the Shell quality — all you can make out is a field of lights from city slickers burning the midnight oil in their skyscraper offices, while trickles of head- and taillights stutter from junction to junction in the gridlines between them — and there’s very little of the mundane poured concrete and asphalt (or God forbid, the trees) of the daylight city visible to interrupt the spectacle.

Weirdest of all when eating in the CN Tower, though, is not the altitude or the masochistic chill of the air in the restaurant, it’s the sloooow rotation that brings you back to starters just as dessert is finished. I imagine it’s like having mushrooms for dinner. We gratefully got out into the open air of the observation deck (it was, frankly, balmier than the restaurant) and I remembered that being en plein air at a third of a kilometre above the hard, hard ground does not agree with me. I don’t remember being afraid of heights as a kid, but there’s just something particularly Darwinistic about voluntarily leaning over the parapet of the freakin’ CN TOWER to see just how long it would take you to hit the ground.

Fortunately we made it down alive, in the more conventional lift-borne manner.

The next (last!) day, we left our gear in the hostel, had a coffee in a Kensington Market coffee shop and split up for a couple of hours so I could indulge myself at the ROM and Ash could look around the market. We took the bus to Hamilton’s art deco bus station, a taxi to the airport and lastly onto the plane home, and just as I was starting to feel at home.