Travel: 3 days in Toronto

We arrived in Toronto slightly
later than anticipated due to some fog at Manchester Airport which resulted in a
missed connecting flight from London, a missing bag of coats and a chance to
sit in the cockpit of the plane – I am pretty sure the pilot put the call out
for the kids on-board to take advantage of, but lock me on a plane, on the
tarmac, for 1 ½ hours and you’re going to need to entertain me somehow!

We sat in a cockpit. We sat in a cokpit!!!!!

So instead of arriving at our
Airbnb in Toronto mid afternoon, we finished our 21hrs of travelling at 10.30pm
Toronto time (3.30am in the UK) and opted for a shower and a sleep rather than heading out for
dinner! I know, so rock and roll, but tell me you wouldn’t have done the same. Our
early night and jetlag however meant that we were wide awake by 6am the next morning
and in desperate need of food that didn’t come in a re-heated silver tray
before we ventured to Niagra with some of Jim’s friends.

As we were staying in the super cool area of West Queen West our food and drink options were pretty much endless, but our first food stop of the trip came from a ‘You Gotta Eat here’ tip (and was actually our planned location for the missed meal the night before) a 24hr diner called ‘The Lakeview Restaurant’. So in -10 degree temperatures, at a time Jim rarely sees on a work day, let alone a holiday day, we headed out to find food and explore Toronto a bit. It turns out though that cool areas of Toronto don’t wake up before 11, so most of the shops we passed were shut, even on our way back at 10am, and the restaurant didn’t start serving breakfast until 9am. Which wasn’t the end of the world as the night menu still involved pancakes. The diner was so cool and I can imagine a late night dinner there would be awesome. We hoped to go back for apple pie milkshakes but there were too many eating options so didn’t make it.

Our next adventure that day was a little roadtrip to Niagara Falls with some of Jim’s friends from India,who now live in Toronto, Sachin and Rupneet. But I’ll go into that more in another post or this would be photo overload. We ended up spending the day in Niagara and then the evening at their house chatting about everything and eating the Indian way, late!

Our second day in Toronto, Saturday, was spent walking the city, not necessarily with any specific place in mind, just seeing as much as we could, and also shopping for new coats as the ones we’d brought with us had been misplaced by BA. We grabbed lunch at St Lawrence Market, we rode the buses and the cable cars, we bought cocktail paraphernalia from the Cocktail Emporium, and that night we went to see Wolfmother at the Danforth Theatre with Sachin and Rupneet. There may or may not have been far too much beer but it was a great night!

Our third day in Toronto was our last full day and another day of exploring the city. We started with an OK shared brunch at Cardinal Rule followed by a walk along the lake in the sunshine, I bet it’s amazing there in the summer, and then a wander through High Park (There are a lot of dogs on Flash’s instagram that frequent High Park. I didn’t spot any of them though!). We rode more cable cars in directions we’d not yet been to explore more of the city. We walked around the university and ate Timbits, we visited Hey Meatball for an amazing lunch, we went shopping for NFL t-shirts, we had happy hour drinks and bought more cocktail paraphernalia and popped to Ossington avenue for dinner at BQM, where were we had a really fantastic burger and we grabbed a couple of lovely some craft beers from the Bellwoods Brewery. The only mistake was the lack of room for icecream afterwards!

Our final morning in Toronto was spent checking in luggage at the train station, drinking ‘Death by Hot Chocolate’ at Sweet Jesus. We were too early for crazy ice creams at Sweet Jesus but the hot chocolate more than made up for it. If you haven’t already checked out their instagram – do it and see why I wanted to go! We also spent some time grabbing snacks for the upcoming train ride to Montreal.

We had an amazing time in Toronto and I’d love to go back – maybe sometime it wasn’t quite so cold, as summer by the lake sounds amazing. Stay tuned for part two of the trip – Montreal.

_________________________________________________

Travel Info – where we stayed,
how we got about, that sort of stuff;

Accommodation – We stayed in West Queens West, near Ossington Ave in this cute little Airbnb. It was the perfect location for exploring the awesome local neighbourhood and Toronto as a whole, as you could walk downtown or get numerous types of public transport. And the host was awesome too. She left us cookies!

Getting there – We flew in to Toronto with BA and took an Uber from the airport to the apartment which cost roughly £30 (exchange rate late Feb 2016.)

Getting about – We bought a couple of TTC Day Passes to ride the public transport on the days we were in Toronto on our own. It was $12 for both of us to ride for the day on buses, trains and trams. It’s an app that works offline too so no need to be connected to the internet for it!

Eating out – I should say now that a lot of our food choices this trip were informed by Jims research. His go-to background noise TV channel is the food network and he’s a big fan of using google maps to discover places. Some of the shows he watched a lot to do research on where we should eat on this trip are ‘You Gotta Eat Here’ for Canada and ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives’ for America.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply