Gooderham and Worts Distillery (July 2002): Lisa, Sean and Jackie invited me to come with them to an antique show at the long-abandoned Gooderham and Worts distillery. She-ra and others had told me it was really worth checking out, so I decided to put up with the antique crap in the hope of getting inside some antique buildings.
       The whole lot was fenced off with a security guard manning the gate, but once inside the compound, we were more or less allowed to wander freely. I'd always imagined the distillery as being one big old abandoned building, but there are actually dozens and dozens of buildings on the site, two or three of which stand out as being the most interesting. Almost all of them are accessible — or would be, if not for the people nearby.
       Nothing but a plastic barrier was keeping me away from one cool building. I tried a favourite trick of mine, which involves pushing aside the barrier on trip one, stalling for a while, and then strolling past the now-removed barrier on trip two, so that the odds of anyone seeing me push open the barrier and walk through it are greatly reduced. Unfortunately, when I came back for my second run, the barrier had been neatly shoved back into place. I assumed security was on duty.
       Travelling around to one of the smaller buildings with Sean and Jackie, I saw a middle aged man and an old woman peeking in the windows longingly.
       "Have you found a way in yet?" I asked the guy.
       "No," he said, "just looking."
       In a way that communicated "I'm not", I hopped onto a ledge and hoisted myself through a window onto a staircase and climbed up to the second storey. Unfortunately, Jackie couldn't come up, since he's a baby, and Sean felt obliged to hang around with Jackie, but there was little to see aside from some scaffolding, benches and toolboxes. After I'd been looking around for a couple of minutes, the middle-aged man who'd been "just looking" climbed through the window and joined me, and we explored a little together.
       Outside, I managed to poke around in a few of the other smaller buildings and then decided to make an attempt on one of the larger buildings in back, but a security guard spotted me just as I wandered off the beaten path and told me no one was allowed back there, adding "that's where we dump all the nasty stuff". I made a note to keep that in for my next visit.

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