When I was a kid, we used to walk to our grade school (middle school) every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow. I did the same walk each day for about five years or so.

That’s five years of walking past the same scary high schools, same convenience store, same homes, same trees, you get the idea.

A while back, I heard someone talking about virtually walking to school again using Google Street View. I gave it a try and was totally enthralled by the experience. It brought back such vivid memories of hiding behind a wall and throwing snowballs at cars, of buying candy at the convenience store (or panhandling out front), stopping in at an old apartment building to pick up a friend, a near death from a falling tree during a storm.

It also brought back great memories of my brother Mike and friends, Carrie, Pat, Maria, Richard, Spence, and others whose names are slipping my mind at the moment.

The virtual walk was strange because many of the buildings have changed now. I had no idea that a group of homes had been torn down to build condos. In fact, one of the high schools had become a condo too! Oh, Toronto, when will the condo fetish cease?

Still, the majority of buildings are where they were way back when. Even the old decrepit wall is still there. It's the one that we used to climb to sneak under the fence of the high school’s football field, or to roll down into massive banks of snow. 

The whole experience of virtually walking to school again was an amazing one (I'm a sucker for nostalgia). It took a few minutes and many clicks to get there, but not nearly as long as it did by foot, and it was a heck of a lot warmer this time too. 

Give this a try for yourself. Has your old neighborhood changed much?

Let me begin by explaining that I do not work in the film industry, nor do I shoot animals. Having come from Toronto, it's hard not to have learned a thing or two about how movies are made. I expect coming from Nashville; most natives know enough about hunting (whether they do it or not). 

In the film industry, Toronto is known as Hollywood North. At any given moment, you can see multiple film shoots occurring. The city can easily be transformed to resemble New York or Chicago because of the similar architecture. Filmmakers get a nice tax break, and that weak Canadian dollar helps seal the deals too. Chicago, the movie, was filmed in Toronto. 

After I returned to Toronto from backpacking Europe, I worked nights and some days at an international youth hostel. I intended to meet fellow backpackers but also save enough money to return to Ireland for a year (which I did, and then some). 

I used to work Saturday or Sunday mornings at the hostel. If things were slow and we had vacancies, I would drive to the local bus station to find international backpackers arriving. I would happily approach them, show them fliers for the hostel, and give them a free ride if they needed one. Most people eagerly took me up on the offer.

Officers swarmed out of nowhere with their guns drawn!

Photo from Flickr by dtstuff9. 

I clearly remember one Saturday morning as I waited for future hostel guests to arrive at the bus station. The sky was blue, and the sun shone brightly at the busy downtown intersection. Suddenly, unmarked police cars swarmed the streets. Undercover officers swarmed out of nowhere with guns drawn at a man crossing the road. They each yelled, "Get down with your hands up!" The bad guy dropped to his knees; he knew they had him captured. There was no point in resisting or trying to escape. 

As a Toronto native, I knowingly glanced around for the cameras. Yep, I spotted it. A large crane was at the corner with a camera facing down on the scene below. An action-filled shot like that was presumably a major scene of the film. The director yelled, "Back to ones, people", and they began to shoot it again - and again and again. 

Each time the police takedown began, unsuspecting pedestrians would duck for cover thinking it was all real. The pedestrians were usually weary travelers having just stepped foot into Toronto from hours of travel. Welcome to Hollywood North. Soon after they learned it was a film shoot, the embarrassed people would laugh about experiencing a staged police takedown, right as they stepped off the bus! Now that is a story to share with your loved ones back home.

The part where I got embarrassed...

When I moved to Nashville, I was taking a walk around the surrounding neighborhoods. As I walked past a house, I saw a man outside in a camouflage jacket and scruffy beard. A large Ford F-150 truck was parked in his driveway with a huge apparatus attached to the trailer. It was a large steel crane that could be elevated with a stand at the top for the camera. I instantly got excited at the thought that movies were being shot in Nashville too. 

I smiled at the man and asked him what he was shooting. He looked dumbfounded and yelled, "Deer!" I could swear he added a "duh" to his reply. When I returned home to Heather, I told her the story. She laughed out loud as she explained what a deer stand was. What I thought was a camera crane was a tripod for hunters to get above their targets to blast them to bits. 

I had misidentified the hunting accessory. At least I was correct about something getting shot from that thing. In my defense, nowadays, many hunters film their victims from their deer (or tree) stands and post them on YouTube. So maybe I wasn't completely wrong. Okay, I was. :) 

Has this ever happened to you? What object did you mistakenly take for something else?