Take Off, Eh! - Special Dispatch from Toronto, ON

Greetings from the Great White North, where it really is great, white, and north of New Jersey. It's also pretty warm, a balmy -12 degrees (celsius). To convert this to fahrenheit, simply multiply by 9/5ths and add 32. In other words, its about 10 degrees to you, and a bit colder with that wind. For someone like me who thoroughly enjoys cold weather, and also complaining about people who constantly complain about cold weather, it's almost a vacation, except I sometimes have to work.

While at night I may be known as DJ Milky, during the day I have a couple joe jobs where I'm known as either just Erik or, in the case of my job as video assistant for the Scarlet Knights, Milky. So when the Rutgers University Football team rounded up it's entire support staff for the trip here to play in the International Bowl, along I went. This is my second trip to Toronto, the first being a few years ago when the crew drove up for the weekend to see Oasis play the Molson Centre. However, this is not your average trip across the border. For roughly 15 hours or so, I was living (not really, but sort of) like a rock star.

New Year's Eve found DJ Milky working late into the night. This is nothing new, but getting up at 9am the following morning to leave was. With about 2 hours of sleep under my belt after a night of heavy partying, I drove from Brooklyn to Piscataway in the rain, changed into a suit, got on a bus escorted by three state trooper patrol cars, got off the bus on the runway and got onto a charter 757. This was optimal because at this point, having to make a trip through the terminal at Newark airport would've killed me. Also awesome: We were greeted on the plane with a gourmet sack lunch, and I'm pretty sure no one was more ecstatic about this as I was.
Nothing like a smoked turkey wrap, ginger ale, milano cookies, cheese, and an apple to kill a brutal hangover. And an hour or so later, we're touchin' down at YYZ.

Nothing too exciting happened after that. I've walked at least 5 or 6 miles around Toronto in the last 24 hours, and went to Tim Horton's twice. Tim Horton's is the Dunkin' Donuts of Canada, in that they both serve delicious coffee and are located on almost every streetcorner. However, there is one key difference: everything you order at Tim Horton's comes with a donut. EVERYTHING. Coffee? Duh. Turkey Club? Well, OK. Bowl of chili? Now there's a donut to dunk. Maybe one day I can open up the first Tim Horton's in New Jersey.

Today, we set up some video equipment at the practice facility at the University of Toronto, where I encountered a great example of the disparity of sporting priority here in Canada as opposed to America.

The University of Toronto "Varsity Blues" (nice team name) hockey arena, which has substantially more seating than it's football stadium. It's all hockey, all the time. Front page, back page, even their professional NHL team, which sucks, is sold out for the next 17 years. However, I think I'm even more fascinated by the daily curling column in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

I'm off now to sample some tasty Canadian brews at highly-regarded C'est What and hopefully stop at Tim Horton's on the way back. You can catch me on the sidelines this Saturday at noon on ESPN2. Until then, I'll leave you with this parting shot of the view from my hotel room on the 24th floor of the Westin Harbor Castle:



Thanks Coach!