Holiday to Canada in Aug 2024: Day 1 – Evening in Toronto

It was a fair old walk from Gate C33 to the Immigration Hall, where we joined a huge queue with no instructions as to what we were supposed to do.

Some passengers had printed receipts, most had nothing and the queue snaked through lines of kiosks, few of which were being used.

Vick took a punt and tried a kiosk to see whether that might speed our progress. It turned out to be the first step in the process but no one had told us. Bizarre.

We got our receipt and rejoined the queue. About 15 mins later having seen every square foot of the enormous Immigration Hall, we finally showed our printed receipt to an officer, who marked it with a highlighter and we proceeded through to baggage reclaim.

It was packed, which made finding our way through to the exit pretty challenging as we were pulling our cases along behind us.

When we finally left baggage reclaim, we handed in our receipt and we headed to door D, pillar C24 to pick up our Uber.

Typical chaotic mess of ride cars all over the place, getting in each other’s way. Finally Vick found our Uber and it was a 45 min drive to the Hilton. It was slow due to it being rush hour.

Check in at the Hilton was super quick and we were soon into room 1301, a corner junior suite with a view of the CN Tower from our room.

We headed straight up to the Exec Lounge to check out the appetizers that were available. Typical fare, but nothing suitable for the Vickster.

After a quick shower, we identified a local Mexican which might just make up a plate of tacos for us. Difficult to find, but Tecolote did us proud.

It was located in Chefs Hall at 111 Richmond. We sat outside on the patio and it felt like our holiday had started.

We walked around trying to find a supermarket that would sell us some basic milk and that proved to be really challenging.

Everywhere seemed to have lots of alternatives to milk (e.g. soya, lactose free), but no sight of 2% semi skimmed!

We headed back to the hotel and asked the Front Desk for some milk, who later sent up a glass of milk and charged us $7 for the privilege!

We had robes and bottles of water sent to our room (free luckily) and we hit the sack just after 8pm.

It was noisy in the room. We were close to the lifts and we could hear guests walking to their rooms. We wouldn’t expect them to be quiet early in the evening!

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Canada in Aug 2024