Holiday to Canada in Aug 2024: Day 10 – Kingston to Toronto

By Nige on September 9, 2024 at 8:06 pm
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Canada in Aug 2024 Category: Travel
Tags: Canada | Hertz | Hilton | Holidays | Kingston | Toronto

What a perfect start to the day.

We were both awake before 6am, and I opened the curtains so that we could watch the sunrise through the windows of our corner suite from bed.

The colours were stunning, and it was amazing to watch this lovely little town come to life.

The local Starbucks opened at 6:30am, and we headed out slightly before. It was a chilly 11 deg c, but there was very little wind, so it didn’t actually feel that cold.

Just before arriving for our caffeine intake, the town was rudely awoken by 4 fire trucks with horns blaring.

Apparently, there was some sort of fire in a car park not far from where we were.

We hoped that was the excitement for the morning done.

Our Starbucks was tasty, as always. The staff were friendly.

There were no tables, so we had to walk back to the hotel, where we enjoyed the rest of our coffee in bed.

Our trip today was carefully calculated based on our need for charging, Starbucks drinks and breakfast, together with needing to drop the car at the airport with at least 60% charge left.

Our first stop was Trenton for a combined Starbucks and supercharging top up.

They even had oatmeal available, so the Vickster thoroughly enjoyed her breakfast!

On to a second supercharger at Pickering. It was a large supercharging site, and there were a number of owners chatting about all things Tesla.

Our next stop was supposed to be the Upper Don Trail, which comprises a 7km trail, but we hunted for a car park, and we couldn’t find one! Agh!

So, straight on to The Cheesecake Factory…

The shopping mall was not busy at all, but it also didn’t have any real shops for real people. Just posh shops selling overpriced posh stuff with a small posh person’s discount which still made everything posh expensive.

TCF was really busy even though it was a Monday lunchtime. But we got a booth easily enough.

We shared the tacitas as a starter. Then Vick ordered BBQ chicken ranch lunchtime salad, and I ordered the chicken quesadilla.

Two lemon raspberry cheesecakes were ordered to go. After we related our story of the last time we were here, our waitress added in extra raspberry couli.

We headed off on our final stop: the airport car rental return. No issues to report and we quickly confirmed all was well with the car.

We ordered an Uber to take us back into the city, which was slow due to the time (3pm on a Mon).

We arrived at the Hilton Hotel, Toronto around 3:30pm, so our room should have been ready. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Luckily, they assigned another room, room 3011 on one of the Exec Floors, which was good and ready for us.

No junior suite on this occasion. The hotel was chocker, possibly due to the film festival.

We had no specific plans for the rest of the day, other than to devour our cheesecakes. So we chilled out in our room and planned our final day in Canada, before jetting back to the UK tomorrow.

After a bit of a snooze, we decided to head up to the Exec Lounge to check out the hors-d’oeuvre.

It wasn’t very busy (after all it was a Mon evening) but the food on offer was classic Hilton Exec Lounge fayre.

It was fine, but was not going to win any awards.

From there we popped out to visit two of the main tourist locations from our first visit last week: Nathan Philips Square, where the Toronto sign is, and David Pecaut Square, where the film festival was based.

Most of the razamataz had been removed from around the Toronto sign, but there were still a few tourists taking photos (including us).

We spent a bit more time down at the film festival, which was in full swing.

We walked into the fan zone, where from 10pm (or so), fans could watch the film of the day, whilst the celebs would be watching the same film in the Royal Alexandra Theatre across the road.

There were a shed load of people hanging around, we assume waiting in a queue to get into the fan zone.

Being a queue, we were tempted to join it, just because it was a queue!

Back to the hotel and we enjoyed the main event: our cheesecakes, with extra raspberry sauce.

Wow! Best cheesecakes we have ever had.

Holiday to Canada in Aug 2024