2015 Pan Am Games....

They are being held in Toronto this time around and start on July 10th.  Suffice to say a silly amount of money has been spent making sure we look presentable to whomever is interested in this sort of stuff?  

Me personally, can't say I am awfully bothered but there were a couple of things about it worth mentioning I thought.  We are "lucky" to be in close proximity to a couple of event locations, one of them being this:

You see someone in their wisdom decided to designate letter abbreviations to the specific events locations.  Fortunately on the website it decipher's the codes for you and it turns out TTS stands for Pan AM Shooting Centre; why TTS who knows???  We are also close to CCE - Pan Am's Cross Country Centre and CEP - Caledon Pan Am Equestrian Park.  Close to where our daughter lives is PAC - CIBC Pan Am/Parapan Am Aquatic Centre.  You can read more about these locations here.  I feel sorry for most people as the local news asked local people what these abbreviations meant and no one had a clue!!  So goodness knows how the folk visiting from out of town can figure it out, if the locals can't?

Going through the top of Toronto is the 401 Highway.  It is one of the busiest highways in the country.  "They" whomever they are have decided to make one lane in various parts an "HOV" lane. 

"HOV," means a High Occupancy Vehicle Lane.  Normally it means you have to have two or more occupants in your vehicle but from now until the end of the games you have to have three people in your vehicle or accredited Games vehicles used to transport athletes, media and technical officials.

Now obviously the locals are not happy about this, as the ones close to our daughter's means it goes from three lanes in the express to only two lanes and believe me it makes a HUGE difference not having that third lane.  Yes there are the collector lanes, which is another three lanes, but the traffic back ups are bad.  Even on Sunday the road was slow and very busy.

We observed that also a lot of people was using this lane with under the three person occupancy as stated.  Other's were just using it as an over taking lane so all in all they were not taking a blind bit of notice of the rules.  

It explains here in more detail which roads are affected etc.  Locals have been told to take vacation or work from home if they can to avoid the extreme traffic congestion.  Son-in-law luckily doesn't work too far from home, so shouldn't be too inconvenienced.  Daughter though is going to work from home as she went to the office last week and it took forever to get there.

We can take a different route to our daughter's if we want to go down.  Was pleased to see some major roadworks have wrapped up, so that will ease the traffic a little.

I hope for everyone's sake the games are a success so at least we recoup some of the money that has been forked out to host this; as I am quite sure we the tax payers are paying for all of this!

I will be back to regular blog posts tomorrow, as this sort of subject is just not my thing!


Oh and just in case you are wondering, no we won't be attending any of these events, but may watch highlights on the tv.