Toronto

When work needed someone to hand-deliver a package to Toronto, I put my name forward in a second. It meant I would have to miss the All Blacks quarter-final but this proved to be a blessing in the end.

So with two day's notice I boarded the plane mid-day Saturday, metal suitcase hand-cuffed to my wrist. Four hours later with package delivered I had 20 free hours to enjoy Toronto. Brilliant.

Andy, who had recently moved to Toronto, kindly put me up in his 27th floor apartment (view from balcony below):

On closer inspection, we were somewhat short of the 27th floor with the oddly superstitious Canadians leaving out floor number 13 and any number including the digit 4. The photo below shows the elevator buttons. Very very odd. I see they did have P4 though - I wonder if it was a less popular parking level?

After a bit of a swim and a few unbelievable texts by an English mate in Bermuda trying to tell me that not only had England beaten Australia but the All Blacks lost to France (surely it's still a nightmare), Saturday night was spent having a beautiful dinner (well a bit of dinner and a lot of drinks) at one of the local restaurants. We ended up staying there 'til well past 1am (that's how good the drinks were) before heading back to Andy's apartment to watch some real rugby - highlights of the Mighty Hawkes Bay defeating Waikato in their quarter-final. A great result.

The next morning only left us a few hours to play with before my flight home so we headed into town early to see some of Toronto's sights. Unfortunately the weather didn't come to the party and from ground level we couldn't even see the top of the Toronto Tower (second highest free-standing tower after something being built in Dubai). Expecting nothing but grey from up top, all I could do was take a couple of photos from below:

We then wandered alongside Lake Ontario before a clear highlight of seeing a mounted policeman (not to be confused with a Mountie - unfortunately I didn't get to see one of them). Seeing something truly Canadian was a real treat.

And then the long flight home - Toronto to Bermuda via JFK - definitely not the fastest way home but the last leg was my first flying business class... fantastic. You really get looked after, and definitely worth having to make boring conversation with American businessmen.