Toronto to Seattle, Friday/Saturday, 22/23-Jul-2022
Our last full day in Toronto was quiet, with me catching up on things and Melody going to her last conference day. Our travel day back to Seattle was pretty non-eventful, too.
When we are on an extended vacation, Melody and I try to plan a quiet day every now and then to recharge and catch up on things. At one point, we were wondering how many dry days we would have, but just before leaving, it was clear we would probably not have as much rain but would definitely have very hot days. That was good because I could be more flexible with doing things outside, but I tried to leave the afternoons open to avoid the worst of the heat.
The (sarcastically) best part is we’ll be going back to Seattle just in time for a heat wave there, too. Fortunately, it won’t be as hot or last as long.
Friday
Because I had played tourist all week, I decided to take it easy on Friday. I headed to a café for the last half of the morning. When I ordered a hot chocolate, the barista warned me that they make theirs with dark chocolate, and asked if I wanted it sweetened. I assured her that sweetening was not necessary.
In addition to journaling, I began identifying items in photos. I usually take pictures of plaques which makes identifying pieces easy. Since the Art Gallery of Ontario has several rooms with no plaques, I went to the website and tried to match pictures on the pages with my photos. Some were more difficult than others, but I got everything labeled.
When I was done at the café, I picked up some lunch and headed back to the room, where I continued to journal. Melody showed up mid-afternoon and mentioned that dinner was being set up and that I was invited to go. Since it was an early reservation, it wasn’t too long before we started heading over.
It sounded like the dinner organizer wasn’t sure how many people would show up, so she made the reservation for eight, but 12 showed up. Fortunately, we were in a place that could fit all of us. The food was great and the conversation lively. The server was gracious enough to do individual checks. Since bottles of wine were shared around, several people put a bottle on their checks and others gave them cash.
Speaking of cash, the conference organizers encouraged people to have cash available to simplify splitting meal costs, but all of the places they went were able to split checks. We had gotten cash early on, so Melody used it for meals even though she could have charged it on a card. I ended up using no cash. Since contactless payment is so ubiquitous, I didn’t need to even use my physical cards.
After dinner, we got some ice cream on the way back to the room. Because, of course.
Saturday
This was our travel day. We had so much extra time, instead of strategizing to make sure we weren’t late, we had to figure out how to spend our time.
Since we had our morning routine, we went ahead with having breakfast when the service opened. We then packed things up, checked that we hadn’t missed anything, then checked again. We did leave some electronics and chargers out so we could do some things online.
Checkout time was 10am, so we dawdled until about 9:39 then tucked our final items away. We gave the keys to the porter and then went to a café across the street from the closest subway station. After getting drinks, we got our computers out. Melody did a quick translation job while I started uploading my backlog of photos.
A couple of hours later, we went to the subway, went to Union Station, and started looking for lunch. We found the food court and took our time eating. Checking the train schedule, we wouldn’t make the next train, so we got some dessert on the way to the platform.
The night before, we had looked up what the fares would be and added enough to our transit cards so we would have no value on them afterward. The websites had a different fare than what we paid on the way in, but to be safe, we topped off with the higher, published fare. Now we each have a few dollars on our cards for next time.
The train got us to the airport about an hour and a half before the recommended arrival time (three hours before departure) but we’re good at killing time. We found the Global Entry line, and saw only one kiosk being used. We scanned our boarding pass, had our pictures taken, and then we were through. Security screening had no line, and neither did customs. Just like that, we were through.
Since we had already gone through immigration, we were in what was effectively U.S. territory, which meant we could only stay in our part of the terminal. Fortunately, there were a lot of services, even a vending machine where you could buy slices of cake.
We did more computing after finding a place to sit (upload bandwidth was fast, so I could continue uploading photos), walked around a bit, and ate dinner. We were a little worried that almost all of the flights before ours were late. Ours continued to show as being on time, and fortunately our flight ended up being less than a half hour late.
Because we were going east to west, we had an extended dusk and sunset, landing in Seattle to the lights of the city. It was after midnight (3am Toronto time) when we stepped through the door, so we did the least amount of unpacking we had to do and got a good sleep.
