Flight day dawned. All the bags had been repacked and reweighed, and all of them, thankfully, came in under the 23Kg limit. I eschewed breakfast on the grounds that I didn't need to spend another £20 on food when I'd done nothing but eat over the past month, and we moved seamlessly to getting the bags downstairs and loaded into the rental car again.
It's only a couple of minutes drive from the Hyatt Place to Terminal five, but I still manged to be in the wrong lane, and subsequently on the wrong road when trying to get back to the car hire drop off point. I managed to correct things without going too far out of our way, but still struggled with the complicated instructions on how to get to the drop-of point. Essentially it was a case of driving almost all the way around the T5 Sofitel Hotel before finding the entrance. They have a kind all 360 degree scanner you drive through when you leave, and again when you return. I guess it compares dents and scratches and the like without having someone come out and check. To the best of my knowledge, I hadn't added to the car's patina, so that was all good. Apart from dropping the key back in to the office, we didn't have to do anything other than unload the car - onto three trolleys - make our way back through the Sofitel and head into the departures hall of Terminal 5.
Dumping the bags was the first order of the day, so we did a self-service bag drop and boarding pass collection, which was all we needed to do having checked in online the night before. DW and I sat and relaxed before going through security, while Emma and Charlie went for a ride on the T5 Pod system for twenty minutes.
Going through security was relatively painless, for us at least. Emma had her bag opened and manually checked thanks to her carrying a big, resin, Lilliput Village church in her carry on baggage. Time had slipped away quickly, so we decided to head straight out to the gate, which was about as far away as you get from where we had arrived airside. You can walk it, and we have done that in the past, but this take we took the "transit", a little underground train that doesn't run often enough to make it a comfortable trip because it's always so crowded. Heathrow seems to specialize in not realising how many people move through their place; I remembered with horror the wholly inadequate lifts in Terminal 2, lifts that had no viable alternative, and were always bursting at the seams. The world's busiest airport really needs to do better, I think.
Our transport for the flight home waiting at the gate, and with the power of the Internet at hand, I interrogated it and found out that our aircraft was a 2025 Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It has come back to London from Barbados the previous day, and Toronto was its only flight this warm afternoon. How informative.
In our World Traveller Plus cabin, I was surprised to see the seat configuration was 2-3-2 and not 2-4-2 as it had been on the Airbus on the way over. Indeed, the seats were bigger, better padded and altogether an improvement over the outward leg. The Dreamliner also has fancy LED windows that lighten or darken at the push of button and, more pertinently for the crew, could be controlled as one from the flight deck, so no messing about with getting people to lift the window blinds for take off.
We were sitting over the wing so were treated to a lot of wind and engine noise, and the sight of the Boeing's wing lifting and wobbling. It's a good job I understand the principals of flight or I might be a bit worried. The last time I flew on a 787, I remember it being quieter, but I'd trade the noise for the better seats any day. Flights are as flights are, pretty boring. The food was better this time, and I did enjoy a short while with Charlie on my lap watching Paw Patrol, which is so much better without the sound.
Then we were banking out over Lake Erie for a rare northward landing at Toronto Pearson Airport, getting a great view of the Islands and the CN Tower, which was all the better as it had been cloudy since we passed over Ireland. The airport wasn't much fun, though. Terminal 3 was packed, the customs kiosks were playing up and it took an age for two of our bags to show up in the arrivals hall, thanks to a technical fault in the conveyor system. The magic of Park and Ride was working well, though, as a Valet Parking bus was waiting at the curb, and as I'd already notified them through their phone app that we'd landed, the car was sat in the lot waiting for us. I do like Park and Fly, and it did take the edge off the fact that it had taken us two hours to clear the airport.
Opening up the back of car to load our many bags, it was quite comforting to see that our Canadian (made in Ontario) Honda CRV had quite a bit more luggage space than our Skoda hire car, so the game of baggage Jenga wasn't quite so difficult. Mind you, two bags "self-unloaded" when we opened the tailgate at the On Route in Cambridge.
We arrived home tired, of course, and out of sorts given that it was 3am according to our body clocks. Still, we'd completed quite the epic journey. A month, give or take a day, and no major dramas (bar the Manchester accommodation), and we did most of the things we'd set out to do. Now, as we Brits are wont to say "we need a holiday to get over the holiday". Next week, people, next week.
