Long Travel Day

Today is a big travel day, all the way from Quebec City to Hamilton. My alarm is set for 6am but I wake up before this. Paula has not even provided her minimalist breakfast this morning, so I make do with coffee. We pack, and say our farewells. Our first train is at 8.10 so we have a taxi booked for 7.30. Obviously this doesn't turn up, but Paula phones the company and eventually a car arrives at 7.40. The station is less than a mile away, so there's no real panic.

Because we're traveling for 13 or 14 hours I had upgraded to business class, which wasn't a big uplift at the time of booking. I am now grateful for this, as the business class food is far superior to that offered in the standard carriage. I can't say the seating was noticeably better, so my advice to my future self is to be to be more organised about provisions and skip the extra cost.

We pull into Montreal at 11.30 and have nearly two hours to spend. We go and look for the underground city. This is a network of over 20 miles of subterranean streets and shops. The entrance to this proves rather elusive, despite being given plenty of pointers by the locals. The reason for this is that what we thought was part of the station was actually part of the underground network - the join is seamless.

A lot of the underground streets are empty and the shops closed. Perhaps they take on a life of their own during the Canadian winter, when I can see the attraction of keeping under shelter.

The next leg of the journey is a long 5 hours. There is an update to Vera's phone situation, which passes a good portion of the journey. The promised phone call from EE never materialises, and she spends an age trying to get through to customer services. There is good news though. They confess that the upgrade sold for Canada was wrong and unsuitable but will provide an equivalent deal at a better price. The actual conversation took a lot longer than that, and required several calls as we went in and out of phone reception.

The train was 30 minutes late into Toronto Union Station, where we were getting a bus to Hamilton. We eventually find the very poorly signed Union bus station, with assistance as ever from helpful locals who seem to have an intuitive sense of when someone is lost or confused and step in to help.

The busses in Ontario are great. They all have bike racks on the front that can take two bikes. Here is Jayden putting his bike on the bus

Vera calls her dad to say we'll be arriving at 9. The call fails to get through. Experimentation reveals that calls to UK numbers seem to connect but calls to local numbers are now being cancelled. Accessing data, which was the original problem, seems fine. So the EE saga continues, and Vera's level of frustration and anger increases.

We finally arrive at Mike's at 9pm. It's been a long day, and we're tired 

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