Closing out this Canada Day long weekend with a nod to Tim Hortons, the beloved Canadian coffee and donut chain.
So if Canada has, as I assert, a bit of a national drinking problem (most of our holidays devolve into some sort of excuse to get blisteringly drunk whilst lakeside) Tim Hortons is the caffeine and starch purveyor that puts hangovers in their place the morning-after. I don’t love Timmies, as it’s affectionately called, as much as many of my fellow countrymen and women, although I have warm memories of my dad and I making late night Tim’s runs when I was attending university and he’d shuttle me to and from class. I’d get this powder-based “espresso” concoction that was nothing but pure, ear-splitting sweetness and watery milk; my gateway coffee drug. 😉 They also serve these little donut holes called Timbits – they’re essentially legalized Canadian crack. Perfect for putting some much-needed spring in your step the Tuesday after the long weekend, so chow down and, as always, drink up, Canada.
Finger Candy 
These are the best and most Canadian nails I have will ever bare witness to!
Ha, thank you! Maybe should have saved them for Rrrroll Up the Rrrrim time, but I thought they worked now!
I bet if you went into a tims and showed your nails you would get something free for being awesome!
I love it, thank you! I should definitely try that. 🙂
Okay, so how weird is this. I’d never heard of ‘Tim Hortons’ until just last month (I had to google who/what it was) when rumours started circulating that they had signed a lease for a new building in a town called Stenhousemuir. Now the name of that town is locally known, but to the wider world, even wider country it’s a nothing, a blip, insignificant. So I was even more perplexed to find out it’s going to be one of the first in Scotland, and it’s also going to potentially be a drive-through. What? Really, in Stenhousemuir… I also didn’t know you could even do a drive-through coffee. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excitied (especially after finding out from yourself they sell doughnuts too) but I just don’t know if Stenhousemuir has the right sort of customer base to put it politely however it’s super close to a couple of schools and pretty central to all the main motorway routes so maybe they have that sussed.
So, to conclude all of that babble, how odd should I find you painting some Tim Horton nails!
Nope, that’s weird! *Insert Twilight Zone music here* One of those odd little moments of small global kismet, huh? 🙂
I’m not surprised to hear that Tim’s is making a move in Scotland, because they’ve been trying to branch out into the States, Europe and the UK for a little while now. I actually think they’re now owned by the Burger King consortium or what have you. Here in Canada Tim Hortons’ franchises still have a pretty strong hold in the big cities, but I think they play best in smaller cities and towns (and villages) – that familiar, ubiquitous coffee shop chain where you can roll up to the drive-through (oh yeah, that’s a thing) and get your favourites. That seems to fit with a place like Stenhousemuir (love that name so much!) – I bet it’ll be a test store or something.
Yeah, so drive-through coffee…it’s weird. But Timmies does it just about as right as you can – they’re speedy, speedy, speedy because otherwise, the lineups of cars would literally stretch onto the streets.
When it’s all said and done, though, I really don’t know why people go so mental for Tim’s – it’s not very good coffee, and the sandwiches are…food. You know, if there’s nothing else. *Shrug*
I am so ready to give drive-through coffee a go, it sounds ridiculous. For me a coffee is something to sit down with and chat over with a friend. (when I say coffee, I’m a baby so I really mean something like a mocha or chai latte or a totally non-coffee related hot chocolate. ) I can understand why others need it as a drive-through, the whole fast coffee addiction fix right.
It’ll be interesting to see how it does, and without sounding like a right bore here, at least it’ll also bring a few jobs to the area.
See, your idea of coffee is what coffee IS supposed to be – a beverage over which to chat and catch up, relax, read, etc. Pretty sure sitting in your gas-guzzling SUV for five minutes in a giant lineup while you wait for your hot, caffeinated swill is sort of antithetical to the whole coffee experience! But job creation trumps that other stuff, I suppose, and Tim’s is a big, big employer around here.
Back about, oh gosh, 10 years ago now when the war “effort” was really picking up steam and the Canadian military was in the Middle East, a Timmie’s outpost opened in Kandahar for the service members and their allies. I understand it was the most popular place in the world for the time it was open.
I could believe it! It must have been so nice to have a ‘bit of home’ in a totally hellish place doing something hellish in itself.
I know myself after a particularly long day (nothing compare to them obviously, I’m just talking about something like being stuck in a cold pool for 3 hours and kicked in the boob by a child) having a nice hot chocolate certainly helps chill me out.
Hey, getting kicked in the boob by a kid is totally its own kind of hell – granted, not Kandahar hell, but it can’t be a competition. 🙂
And that was precisely the lure of the military-minded Tim’s – the familiarity and comforts of home in a place where both are in exceedingly short supply. My dad used to do a lot of work in the realm of international business, and he traveled quite a bit in China. He was always super open minded about the food (he’s eaten everything, even the things we’re probably not supposed to eat!) but at least once per trip, he’d go to a Burger King or a KFC and gorge-out, probably just to remind himself of what he wasn’t quite missing at home!
Haha I love this!!
Thank you, glad you like them!
First Canada’s favorite beer, now Timmies. Can’t wait to see what appears next in your Iconic Symbols of Canada series, I just titled it that.
I’ve eaten at Tim Hortons years ago during the end of a Windsor trip that devolved into an argument over where to grab breakfast before crossing back over the border. We were hungry and had passed about 4 of them, before I commanded, “let’s just stop there already!” After eating, I understood why my fellow travelers werent excited for it, but time was of the essence. I remember being confused as to why the menu only features donuts and soup?
I love it! Iconic Symbols of Canada…up next, beaver nails (not to be confused with Beavertails, which are of course no such thing – it’s flat, fried dough dusted with cinnamon sugar, thank the Canadian lord!)
Ah, so you’ve done a Tim’s run…well, you’re practically Canadian now! It’s a deeply odd franchise restaurant animal – total rest stop food. I don’t care for either the menu or the quality of those menu items (people only like the coffee, I swear, because they don’t know that Tim’s uses delicious, 18% coffee cream as its default creamer!) but people here LOOOOOVVVVVEEEE it. I used to work in an office where there were always Timbits out on the kitchen counter, and I’d pick them up sometimes – after having stood in a 25 person-deep line (out the door, in the harshest of Canadian winters even!) which I probably considered fairly reasonable. Also, donuts and soup. The hell?
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