Coffee and Curiosities

We went on a road trip today.  Not because we had anywhere to go, but because it was the first Saturday in more than a year that we had nothing that we absolutely had to do.  So because it's almost Hallowe'en, and because Chris has a great love for coffee (I'm definitely his second in his affections - to be fair, he's known Coffee longer ;) we decided to visit Deadly Grounds -- a "coffee and curiosities" shop in Oshawa.   The coffee appealed to Chris.  The Curiosities caught my attention...

This was the first thing we saw when we walked in....

So right away the atmosphere was established.  Definitely not the type of place to appeal to me -- it was dark, tight, and crammed full of stuff.  But looking around there were some details I appreciated, even if not quite my style.   For instance, there was a room in the back that had a wall of mugs

Odd lighting and no apparent organisation, but essentially a room of mugs and stuff.
So much stuff.

And anyone who knows me will be aware, I can't walk past a wall of reading material without, well, reading it (there's a reason I only go into bookstores when I have a ton of time to kill ;)).

One of many mugs

So as I was poking around I found this one mug -- I don't know if you can read it or not, but it says something about "the shelf this mug sits on is not really a shelf... But a door opened by the black handle..." and other instructions I don't exactly remember but that basically encouraged the reader to open the door.

Sure enough, just below the mug was a handle

Right - you're not new here.  Of COURSE I opened the door.

And just about died!

This was angled this way, so it's what you see with the door only cracked open that much, and life-size -- it was taller than I am by a reasonable amount.   I'm pretty sure only my in-my-head voice screamed, but my heart def skipped a couple beats before it made me laugh.   Very well done setup.   Although I'm super curious to know how many people actually read the mug and open the door...   I feel like it's probably not the majority who go in that room.

I brought home some unicorn dust (aka bath bomb)
because it was so the opposite of the shop's vibe that it made me laugh ;)

Anyways both the coffee (according to Chris) and the hot chocolate (according to me) were quite disappointing and definitely not worth the more than 2h drive to get there.  But it was at least a different experience ;)

They even made the rocking-horse mildly terrifying!

Also - unrelated but made me laugh -- on the drive we realised that bridges on this stretch of the 407 are decorated with images with a different theme per bridge.   We drove under one that was academia and I made some comment about "that's my bridge" -- then when I looked back from the other side once we passed it, the other side was decorated with horseback riding.  Definitely my bridge.