Arrival in Toronto

It was quite late when we got into Toronto on Monday 4th of October. It would soon roll into the 5th of October as the night went on. We were being met by Kim’s distant 3rd cousins, Marion and Andrew. They were good enough to offer us a room with them and to show us around Toronto, which was a very thoughtful and kind thing to do. I just want to state that we did appreciate the gesture, but in hindsight, perhaps we should have stayed somewhere else and done our own thing. But I am getting ahead of myself, so here is where the Toronto experience begins.

We got off the plane quickly and managed to get our bags with no hassle at all. This was good as it was quite late and we were tired from travelling all day. We headed through the terminal doors and Kim instantly saw Marion and Andrew standing there waiting for us. It all started well with them. There was the usual banter and conversation when you meet someone new as we walked outside of the terminal. They had arranged for a limo transfer from the airport back to their place. They were a little lost as they exited the terminal as they didn’t know where the limo was. They didn’t know where to go at all. We were pretty much oblivious to the ramifications of this ‘lack of knowing’ at the time as we were rather tired.

The car finally arrived. It was a town car, not a limo, but it was still nice. It was a little cramped in the town car with five people and all our luggage, but we managed. We made it to their apartment without incident.

Marion and Andrew lived in a basement apartment. When Kim was telling me about where we would be staying I had visions of something like Laverne and Shirley, or some other cool basement apartment. This was neither. Their apartment had two windows that had no outlook. It was dark and a little stuffy.

They had given up their bed (a double) for us which was very nice, but we were afraid to move around in it too much as it didn’t feel the most secure. We have had previous encounters with a bed that wasn’t all that sturdy, in Crabtree back home (in Tasmania), where the bed fell apart when we started getting into it. So with that in mind we never moved much in that bed.

At this point we were both tired and hungry. They hadn’t thought that we would be hungry, but tried in vein to feed us. A small discussion broke out between them, which sounded like a niggling argument, eventually resulting in Andrew heading out to get food. We ended up eating poorly heated frozen pizza because there was no other store open at that time of night. It wasn’t nice. We got to bed after midnight which turned out to be normal here. Tomorrow/today we were going to Niagara Falls.