What happens when teens are in charge of your Toronto family trip?

With her daughter taking the lead on a recent Toronto family trip, Jane Anderson was delighted to pass the baton and be guided around the city, and Niagara Falls.

CN Tower, Toronto family trip

Step back and put your teen in charge of a Toronto family trip

When your daughter gets the opportunity to study fine art in Toronto, what does every mother do? She packs her bags and heads off to visit her, first chance she gets!

Perched on Lake Ontario’s north western shore (which younger kids will be convinced is a sea not a lake) Toronto is known for its free-standing CN Tower: the tallest building in the world when it opened in 1975. Your teens might recognize it from rapper Drake’s ‘Views’ album cover. Along with its big city attractions, a Toronto family trip slowly unfolds its more localized secrets and it’s a good alternative to New York City – especially with teens.

University of Toronto

Toronto delivers on bold art and even bolder architecture

Having my daughter Scarlett as a guide was wonderful, not least as she’d been in the city for a month finding her feet whilst studying at OCAD University, originally founded in 1876 as the Ontario School of Art. You can’t miss OCAD’s flagship building – the Rosalie Sharp Centre for Design, the work of British architect, Will Alsop. Kids may think it’s a colossal piece of LEGO on stilts, and it’s certainly a bold statement, sitting right next to Grange Park: a great spot to add a picnic to your Toronto family trip.

Just next door is the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), well worth a look for its indigenous art past and present. And don’t miss Joice Wieland: Heart On, opening on June 21. Toronto-born Wieland’s humorous and biting artworks helped shape Canada’s changing ideas about gender, nationhood and ecology in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Getting about like a local on a Toronto family trip

Scarlett is also now a dab hand at getting around the city by tram, bus and a subway with only two lines: easy to navigate for a London child used to the Tube. We get off at King Station for St Lawrence Market, a great foodie stop with casual places to eat, including Buster’s Sea Cove.

Kimpton Saint George Hotel, Toronto family trip

Kimpton Saint George Hotel is a great base for a mother daughter Toronto trip

I’m staying at the Kimpton Saint George Hotel on Bloor Street, just around the corner from Scarlett’s student accommodation. Toronto has many old residential streets mixed with its high rises and urban sprawl, and the hotel has a Deco feel as well as super-comfortable beds, and daily wine-o’clock in the lobby lounge at 5pm is another hit; Scarlett joins me for a glass of Canadian white in front of the fire with chess and interesting coffee table books to hand.

BATA Shoe Museum, Toronto

A museum entirely dedicated to shoes, one more thing to love about Toronto

Right opposite the hotel is the BATA Shoe Museum. I can hear you asking, What? A museum dedicated entirely to shoes? Yes indeed, and the clever way it takes you through the evolution of mankind, makes you realize that what we wear on our feet tells us much about how we live, from the Anasazi people, who 6,000 years ago wove yucca plant sandals, to modern day sneakers by MSCHF, a Brooklyn based art collective: proof shoes can most definitely be art.

Lake Ontario and CN Tower

Celebrate the great outdoors without taking your Toronto family trip out of town

A Toronto family trip gives you plenty of scope for kids of all ages and interests. Top of my list would be the Hockey Hall of Fame to learn more about the national obsession with the sport, as well as Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Little Canada, where you can experience the history and architecture of Canada in miniature. Toronto is also home to the LEGOLAND Discovery Centre. But if you want somewhere outdoors to run around or have a picnic, head over to High Park, Toronto’s largest green space, which is so expansive it has hiking trails.

During summer in Toronto, a walk down to the waterfront is a must for bike trails opposite swanky high rise condos. Here families can catch the ferry from Jack Layton Ferry Terminal across to Toronto Island Park with its Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, boating and bird watching. And of course, along with amusements and splash pads, gardens, a petting farm and four of Toronto’s 10 beaches, the lake is also perfect for paddleboarding and kayaking.

Markets, more markets, vintage stores and hidden restaurants

Back in downtown, a must-visit area is Kensington Market, whose Victorian houses, once home to migrant populations, are still holding back the high-rise tide. This bohemian district is where independent shops and tattoo parlors rub along with Tibetan cafes, artisan bakeries and vintage shops. We loved ‘Courage my Love’, a cavernous store with buttons, silk slips, turquoise jewelry, glasses, good cashmere and lots of hippy stuff. Spaced Vintage and Lost Boys Vintage were a couple of other hits too.

My absolute favorite place to eat here was Sunnys Chinese. An unprepossessing handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard stuck on the door, leads you off the street and down a funny little corridor where you’re ushered into a speakeasy-style restaurant with an open kitchen and bar. Pink modernist décor and tables are ready and waiting (though you must book in advance) chopsticks recline on the backs of tiny ceramic pandas, and I’ve never heard serving staff describe dishes so eloquently.

Splash Zone, Niagara Falls, Toronto family trip

Why you should try to add Niagara Falls to your Toronto family trip

Ontario’s most famous attraction, Niagara Falls is about a two-hour drive around the western tip of Lake Ontario, past the legal marijuana greenhouses, and vineyards, then south to the US border where Ontario meets New York State. The raw force of the Falls takes your breath away. They aren’t the deepest or widest in the world, but their sheer volume and power is unmatched. At the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, more than 168,000 cubic meters of water go over the crestline every minute during peak daytime hours – enough to fill 62 Olympic size swimming pools.

Arriving in February, we witnessed huge chunks of ice tumbling over into the river below, which was completely white in the sub-zero conditions. The viewing platform by the side of the falls, known as the ‘Journey Behind the Falls’, is well worth the money, but we were also lucky enough to take a 12-minute Niagara Helicopters’ flight over the Falls: putting this crazy landscape into perspective.

Niagara on the Lake

Miss the Niagara funfair but don’t miss Niagara-on-the-Lake

If you like amusements there are plenty nearby, but Scarlett and I felt this mini Vegas wasn’t at all in-keeping with the natural majesty. Although it’s interesting to hear the history of the area and stories about legends like Marilyn Monroe staying in room 801 of the Crowne Plaza during the 1952 filming of Niagara.

After getting up early to fit this wonder into my Toronto family trip, we drove 30 minutes to the cute, historic town of Niagara-on-the-Lake which became the first capital of Upper Canada in 1792. We stopped for a hearty pub lunch in The Olde Angel Inn which dates back to 1815, and had a rummage around the local shops. We loved old-fashioned Niagara Apothecary shop on main street and the Just Christmas Store where we chose a gaudy pink Santa bauble to remind us of our Niagara trip every festive season.

Pitstop for bubbles and bottle opening lessons at Trius Winery

Our last stop on the packed day out was Trius Winery. We took a fun guided tour including a look at Canada’s largest sparkling cellar: holding over half-a-million bottles at any one time. Here our guide demonstrated the most theatrical way to open a bottle of bubbly: by slicing the neck clean off with a saber. The final tasting room was made for Instagram, and with much hilarity we swung on a giant champagne cork and posed in a gold bath decorated in bubbles!

Back in the city, it was obvious that there is so much of Ontario to explore and one Toronto family trip was not going to be enough.

But Scarlett was off for the weekend to a treehouse in the Algonquin Provincial Park, while I headed to the airport, after an emotional farewell, marveling at how my daughter had led me to so many wonders and was now a fully fledged explorer in her own right.