The trip to Toronto was quite unremarkable and straightforward….with a few exceptions!
The first excitement was at Manchester Airport. They have the new scanners in terminal 2 meaning you don’t need to unpack your bag. However, I always have my bag searched, probably not helped because it’s stuffed full of camera equipment and electronics. This time they were most interested in my laptop, and after 10 minutes of detailed inspection on their fancy machine a security person came over to ask me some questions – they were still looking at my bag on the scanner.
What do you do for a living? What’s in your bag? I enjoyed telling them I no longer worked, and listed the bag contents. When I got to the laptop I was asked if it was a special kind of laptop? Not really, just a new Snapdragon Microsoft Surface. Does it have any magnets in the lid? Not that I knew about. This concerned them – a lot. Apparently they’d not seen this kind of laptop before and didn’t understand why the internal looked the way they did. I offered to show them the receipt, they looked up the laptop on their own, and after taking it out and unlocking with my face they were satisfied. No idea what they found/saw but several of the security people were quite excited, and not in a good way!
Getting onto the plane was also generally unexciting, apart from the getting on the bus, getting off the bus, getting on the bus dance because they’d loaded us before cleaning the aircraft – strange as it had been on the apron unused for 2 days before our flight!
Good seats, plenty of space, and a splendid new (to us) in-flight entertainment system which impressed. Not only was there proper power for real plugs (meaning we could charge devices properly with our own fast-chargers), but the entertainment system allowed you to connect your Bluetooth headphones directly to the screen, and they had AppleTV, MAX and other streaming service content. I settled on the Dune Prophecy mini-series on MAX.
We decided to bring our own food in case of delays, or other food-related catastrophe. So just after take-off we enjoyed our M&S picnic lunch. And good job, the first meal they provided was worse than unremarkable – it was awful. a lump of chicken (which was actually OK) with some kind of unidentifiable tepid additions, a salad covered in dill, etc… Very glad for our own food. Later on they served what is best described as an Air Canada Greggs chicken plait. It was actually pretty good.
Landing at Toronto was fine, and we were very quickly though border control as I’d done our landing applications and bought eTAs before we left. We were waived straight through whilst most other passengers had to queue to speak to a uninformed person with a gun.
Luggage collection was not unremarkable. Our Air Canada app told us to wait by luggage carousel 8, which we did. Then I got 4 messages on my phone from the app telling me the luggage was about to appear….and it did!! All bags together. Well done Air Canada.
We’d decided to use the train and subway to get to the hotel as it wasn’t too far (about 45 minutes with short walks either end and between). This process was actually pretty simple – the UP Express into Toronto Union station, then the yellow subway from Union to Finch, just 3 stops. Nothing remarkable about this journey.
We found our hotel, sorted ourselves and bags out, had a short rest then headed out to find food. Jo had found us a pub/restaurant called Hair of the Dog which turned out to be really good – we had poutine (chips, veal gravy and cheese curds) which was excellent, nachos with the usual toppings plus black olives (surprisingly good!), shrimps with garlic bread and Danny had a burger (though he was quite keen to eat the rest of the food too!) Jo and I had a local beer each (didn’t seem strong but was very nice) Danny had a weird lemon flavoured vodka drink (after I showed the waitress where the date of birth was on a UK driving license) and poor Amelia couldn’t have alcohol so had what turned out to be a very sweet lemonade.
On the way back to the hotel we found a massive supermarket and picked up a few things. It, too, was unremarkable apart from their VAST cheese fridge. Why arrange/display cheese like this? No idea. Looked fancy though.
