We're back on the road

After a stationary summer, we're back on the road. We're in the big city, Canada's most populous city, Toronto, for a long weekend. There is a purpose to our travels, namely to see international jet-setting podcasters Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, from "The Rest is Politics US". DW is a big fan, and I have to say is quite excited at being able to see them in the flesh, as it were.

We booked three nights in the DoubleTree in Downtown Toronto, in Chestnut Street, despite the eye-watering price, so that we could explore the metropolis a little, as well as get to see the DW's friends. But first we had to get there/here.

It's always a pain slogging up Highway 401, Canada's busiest road. The speed limit has been nominally raised from 100kph to 110kph, but that makes precious little difference when most people drive at 130kph or more. Speed limits are mere suggestions in this part of the world, and most especially when you enter the realms of the Greater Toronto Area, appropriately shortened by all and sundry to GTA.

It was plain sailing up to London (Ontario), where first the highway was down to a single lane at Colonel Talbot Road for the removal of a bridge, and second, down to two lanes (from four) for some widening around Highbury Avenue. In between these two bottlenecks, the increasingly busy Highway 402 from Sarnia joins Highway 401 so the traffic denisty is instantly doubled. From London to Guelph, the two right-most lanes of the highway were just two lines of fast moving eighteen-wheelers, leaving everyone else crammed into the third lane, dicing with death by tailgaiting at 130kph and more. 

In my head I had the route mapped out; Highway 402, Highway 403 from Woodstock, the Queen Elizabeth Way from Burlington and finally the Gardiner Express Way into the downtown core of Toronto. Unfortunately, the lady in the satellite warned us of severe delays om Highway 403, so we opted for the alternative route she suggested, to stay on Highway 401. That option least allowed us the added service centre at Cambridge, perfect for a pit stop, and a better road, even if it was marginally further to travel. The disadvantage was that Highway 401 is an absolute nightmare as it enters the GTA thanks to the volume of traffic.

As always in very heavy traffic, there were sudden slowdowns, followed by sudden speed increases. The lady in the satellite told us we were heading for "401 Collectors", which would have been fine if she'd mentioned which Collectors, or at least the eventual intersection number after the Collectors. For the uninitiated, the Highway gets split into two running channels in Toronto, on the left are four or five Express Lanes, and on the right are four or five collector lanes, where vehicles leave or join the highway. The Express lanes and the Collectors run parallel, but go for many kilometres separated by an uncrossable median. Therefore, you need to know which exit you're heading for so that you can judge where you can leave the Express Lanes and join the Collectors. With the paucity of information from the lady in the satellite, I naturally missed the point at which I should have joined the collectors and was marooned in the Express Lanes. To add to the confusion, the leftmost lane was reserved for High Occupancy Vehicles (HOV), that is a vehicle with two or more people in it, that can often avoid slow or stopped traffic. I was a bit wary about using it, not least because it was four or five lanes away from the Collectors, but in theory you're only supposed to leave the HOV lane at specific points. Anyway, people drive even faster in the HOV lane than they do in the regular lanes, and I don't like getting chivvied into approaching 150kph.

The lady in the satellite gave us a revised route, the 427 southbound, so at least I knew when to dive off the Express lanes and onto the Collectors. The 427 is the airport road, so I did know where I needed to leave the Express lanes, and despite an appalling lack of signage, I did find the correct exit and started a run south towards the Gardiner Expressway. Did you know that until quite recently, the first sign for the Airport didn't appear on the 401 until the airport itself was in view? A couple of new airport signs have gone up, but the furthest one away is still less than 5Km before the exit from the 401. Signage here is poor, and I'm being kind in my choice of words.

Another annoying feature of the roads around Toronto is the tendency for the right lane, the driving lane, to magically turn into an exit lane. That caught me a couple of times today, although I suppose if I travelled these roads regularly, I'd get used to them.

On the Gardiner it was scarily busy, but the views of downtown Toronto, and Lake Ontario (note the name) were spectacular. We were aiming to drop in at the Vegan Danish Bakery before getting to the hotel, so we exited the Gardiner at Jamieson Avenue and joined the Parkdale traffic, just at school kicking out time. Fortunately we didn't have far to go.

Turning onto Queen Street West, it was only a block or two until we reached the parking lot that we'd scoped out ahead of time. There were plenty of spaces, and no wonder, when I found it that it cost $10 for two hours, which was a bit steep for this part of town.

Then it was just a short walk to the bakery, along the busy sidewalks, something you don't see in Chatham very often. Queen Street is one of the busy east-west-east routes that run parallel to the lake. It has four running lanes, two each way, but the two curbside lanes are mostly filled with (legally) parked cars, and the two centre lanes are shared with the streetcar tracks. Today, there was a distinct lack of streetcars, but more of that later.

The bakery, somewhere that we have visited before, was open and ready to serve us up some lovely grub. It's not cheap, nowhere is in Toronto, but the food is good. After a hot snack, we left with some exciting pastries, which we intended to enjoy later.

Back in the car, we turned eastwards on Queen Street and headed downtown. The reason there were no streetcars was that the road was all dug up at one point, blocking the tracks. There were buses replacing the trams as far as Shaw Street, and we plodded along behind one. The bus turned off at Shaw Street, and was immediately replaced by a streetcar, so we carried on behind it towards our goal. At one point I decided to lurch off to the right in an attempt to get to Dundas Street before the lady in the satellite said I should, but messed up completely and ended up back on Queen Street, behind a streetcar of course.

It was very slow going for the rest of the route, stymied by road works and people doing daft things, but we arrived at the hotel eventually. I dropped DW at the lobby, and took the car down into the bowels of the earth beneath the hotel to park. As with all these underground parking garages, it was all tight turns and ramps. When I did find a space, I had to back into it, with someone sat right on my tail of course, but no dings were collected and I parked safely. I was on level three, but it went down three more levels, as I discovered when I found the elevators. Given the slowness of trying to drive anywhere in this city, and the fact that I had a good parking spot, I decided that the car was staying where it was for the duration of our stay.

DW had checked us in and we made our way to the twenty-sixth floor (I didn't realise the hotel had that many floors) but when I looked out of the room's widow I realised just how high up we were.

The room, while quite big, is a bit tired. We find ourselves saying the same thing about most of the hotels we've stayed at in the GTA. The bathroom is tiny and, horror of horrors, doesn't have a walk in shower, contrary to the hotel's website description and photograph. A walk-in shower was at the top of DW's requirement list, so she was right onto the ‘phone and trying to get something sorted out. Sadly, there was no chance of a room move, not today anyway, but as recompense the hotel offered us two days' free breakfasts. Not a great offer as the hotel doesn't offer vegan food, so they amended the offer to two days free parking, worth ninety dollars, so that was alright. As DW said, it pays to complain. Me, I'm not the complaining type, but I'm glad that she is.

When we'd settled, we went out for a stroll around. We really are in the downtown core, yards from Nathan Phillips Square and the Toronto's City Hall. It's next to Bay Street, Canada's financial centre, and not too many yards from the mega-mall that is the Eaton Centre. There's a bit outdoor art event in Nathan Phillips Square tomorrow, so there were roads closed and barriers everywhere, but we were able to wander around as the evening darkened. We picked up some dishwasher soap in the mall, another exiting tale to tell, and were witness to the sad sight of the unhoused moving into Nathan Phillips Square to make use of the benches under the concrete walkway. It's a bit of an irony that they have to gather in the shadow of City Hall, but homelessness is a growing stain on not just Toronto, but most towns and cities in the industrialised world. It's doubly painful when you see just how much more wealthy the already wealthy have become. Social comment there, but it needs saying.

Back at the 26^th floor, I tried connecting my Android tablet to the TV to watch a movie, but despite instructions for the TV that said it was possible, the software was locked down so I couldn't access the input source choices. Then I tried signing into Netflix on the TV itself, and kept getting all manner of errors, that was until I disconnected my phone, the sign in medium, from the hotel's Wi-Fi, and then I was able to sign in.

We watched a movie, drank wine and beer, and eat pastries and peanuts. At eleven o'clock, DW decided to run a few plates through the dishwasher (we have a dishwasher!) only to find that the thing was completely dead. She called Maintenance and they said they'd send someone up, but an hour later, no one had shown up. Another call downstairs and we were told the maintenance team signed off at eleven, which you might have thought they'd have said earlier.

Then it was bedtime, in a surprisingly noisy room given how far above the street we are. Still, my Loop ear plugs were deployed and I took the customary thirty seconds to fall asleep. What will Saturday bring, I wonder? Hopefully a working dishwasher.

 

Plymouth (The Original One) 2024 - Homeward Bound

We had an interesting trip back to Canada, starting with the very nice taxi driver who hailed, he said, from Czechoslovakia (not the Czech Republic or Slovakia, you will note). Very chatty and with a better command of English than me. He was driving a Toyota Prius, which seems to be the choice of taxi drivers in provincial towns, as that model of car has conveyed us around quite a lot.

On Plymouth Station, waiting for the London train, we watched with interest as an empty five-car Hitachi set rolled in and stopped halfway along the platform, waiting it turned out for a similar five-car set to arrive from Penzance. At Plymouth, they were to be coupled together to make a ten-car train to London. Only they didn't couple together. The fancy self-coupling system failed, and after twenty-five minutes of the railway people trying, we were about to have the whole train cancelled on us, even though there was a perfectly serviceable five-car set right in front of us. Sanity prevailed, though, and the set from Penzance was abandoned while everyone piled onto what should have been the first half of the train. Once again, all seat reservations were cancelled and the train became very busy. Of course, running late were were going to get stuck behind stopping trains, and despite the "Train Manager" asserting otherwise, the slower trains did delay us and our original twenty-five minutes late became forty-five minutes. It wasn't an issue for us because we'd built a big cushion in our plans, but the poor guy across the aisle was chuntering the whole way as he was going to miss his connection at Reading. 

 

Apparently we could have claimed compensation for the late arrival of the train at Paddington, but frankly I couldn't be arsed. 

The Heathrow Express from Paddington to the airport is indeed an express, albeit an expensive one. Fifteen minutes into the airport from Central London is not to be sniffed at, though, if you've ever had to negotiate traffic and transit in that big city. We didn't pay the top fare, though, because we are smart people.

We arrived at the airport with no more issues, checked in and went through security. I had the whole body scan treatment, shoes wiped and everything, because I'm special, and we headed into the huge shopping mall, sorry, departures area, to await our flight. Given this was a Saturday afternoon in October, it was horribly busy in there, so we opted to go out to the departure gate straight away. I say straight away, but we had our sandwiches first. Who wouldn't?

As with the flight two-weeks ago, it pushed back bang on time and we were heading west in our surprisingly uncomfortable Airbus A350 seats. Also like the outbound flight, of the three meal options offered, two were curry. What is this obsession with curry? Naturally they'd run out of the non-curry dish by the time the meal cart arrived at our seats, so I was well and truly buggered. The flight attendant was beside herself that I had no food, and searched the entire aircraft for a non-curry meal but couldn't find one, so I went hungry. Given that I had eaten a month's worth of food in the previous two weeks, it really wasn't a hardship, but why give up a reason to feel aggrieved? Such a crappy choice of meals kind of calls into question the whole idea of having two out of three meals essentially the same. Don't worry, I have let British Airways know my displeasure, as you knew I would.

In Toronto it all went smoothly. I had filled in the ArriveCan app on my phone before departure, so our customs declarations were ready to go when we went through the passport scanner. People of a right-wing bent here in Canada get very upset at the mention of that App, built as it was to ease the COVID limitations. Me, I'm very happy to be able to do stuff on the app and sail through the airport with comparative ease. If you're a Canadian arriving home by air, the ArriveCan app is the mutts nuts.

Another bit of app automation is the Park N Fly airport parking. I logged the fact that we'd arrived in the terminal, agreed the price (already quoted when we dropped the car off) and immediately was issued with a bar code with which to exit the parking lot. The bus from the airport to the parking lot was driven by Michael B, a jovial man of Jamaican heritage who crammed lots of people on, which was a good thing because he wanted to get people home, and talked himself into a load of very good tips. The car was waiting at the lot, so we loaded up, used the app barcode to get out of the lot, and then we were on our way. That's the kind of app that makes me glad I have a smartphone.

We didn't have to go too far, which was good because even though it was only 9pm in Toronto, our bodies thought it was 2am. We had a room booked at a Marriott hotel in Mississauga for the night, about twenty minutes from the airport. When you just want to get your head down, the general state of the place isn't too important, but this hotel could have been a little more on the ball. The poor woman on Reception was on her own and rushed off her feet, our room was decorated in the current hotel room vogue of "Dark", and the single beside light didn't work. DW tried calling reception, but the aforementioned Reception clerk was too busy to answer the phone, so a visit to the desk was required. The maintenance man turned up quite quickly and fiddled with some wires to get the light working, which did at least make the room usuable. While he was doing that, we took stock and decided that the housekeeping at this hotel could have been a wee bit more thorough. It wasn't horrible, but at nearly $200 a night for an out-of-town hotel room, you can expect better. Indeed, the whole room looked tired, although that seems to be the norm these days.

We did get to bed at a sensible (Toronto) time, and I slept through until 2:30am when I was woken by people crashing around in the corridor outside. I went back to sleep, although DW had a similar experience at 3:30am. I guess that's what happens at hotels close to airports. I was wide awake at 5am, though, and while the dawn dawned, listened to an podcast about the rise of Hitler, as you do. It's alarming that the similarities between old Adolph and today's right-wing populists are striking.

We had planned on a vegan breakfast at a local Copper Branch outlet, but it was closed this Sunday morning, so we set off down Highway 401 in glorious sunshine and way more traffic than should be allowed on a Sunday. A word about driving the the Greater Toronto area; it's friggin' crazy. The speed limit is 100kph, but to find anyone else doing less than 110 would be a miracle. The general speed in around 120, with many going much faster, and weaving between the many lanes in order to make progress. They drive feet from the back of other vehicles at this speed, too, and it's no wonder there are so many rear-enders. There's a new High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane on the way out of Toronto, but unless you're doing at least 130, people are trying to drive over the top of you. I don't use that lane unless the main lanes are slow because I don't want to drive that fast, I don't want to use so much fuel, I'm not in that much of a hurry and I don't want a speeding fine. That last one is never going to happen, though, because the Provincial Police have given up enforcing the rules. They won't stop anyone unless they're going fast enough to merit having their car impounded - it's known as Grandstanding I think.

Anyway, apart from the lunatics, the people driving in the middle lane, the trucks using the left-lane and the tailgaters, it was a very pleasant run. The temperature reached 22C (October 20th!), and the red, gold and yellow trees were spectacular in their autumn colours. The traffic did thin out as we went westwards, and we didn't really get held up the the construction zones. We did stop off in London (Ontario) for a different vegan breakfast at Odd Burger, then in was a gentle run home with no other distractions that US plated cars driving significantly over the speed limit as they made their way home. Call me a crusty old git, but I do think visitors to another country really should have a stab at obeying that country's laws. When they know that they're never going to get caught, though, I guess it's a free for all.

 

That was the run home. We've had better travel experiences, but we made it in one piece, which is really the most important thing.