Leonie and I went for dinner today in the restaurant car, where we were joined by Chantelle and Caroline as we approached Ontario. Luckily, I had been able to get hold of a few bucks from a cash machine in Winnipeg which was feeling less temperamental than the ones in Edmonton, so I was finally able to afford something to eat. Cash machines are always something of an enigma in foreign countries - your bank will happily tell you that your card will work in hundreds of thousands of ATMs worldwide, but forget to mention that outside cities they've spaced them just far enough apart to cause the maximum amount of inconvenience should any of them break down. In Edmonton, it began to seem as though the entire network had gone down - although, to be fair, the machines themselves were all very apologetic about not been able to supply me with cash, as is the North American way. I think one of them told me to have a nice day. Anyway, it was nice to be able to splash out on a decent meal at the end of my train journey across Canada, and eat it in the company of friends while seated at a large window looking out at some of the last bits of beautiful wild scenery I was likely to be seeing for a couple of days as we started to head into the built up sprawl that is Toronto.

I think the last sign that we were still outside the big city was passing through the delightfully named town of Sioux Lookout, which we did at breakneck speed just in case any of us enjoyed taking blurry photographs. With a name like that, I fully expected the train to be held up by Indians on horseback with bows and arrows, but alas it was not to be. As we neared Toronto, these intriguingly named towns quickly began to be replaced by places with boring western monikers onto which somebody had tacked an extra word just to make the place sound exotic - Sudbury Springs for example. When you finally get into Toronto itself, all pretence is finally lost and you find yourself surrounded by place names which have simply been lifted from England without any effort being made to make them sound exotic at all - names such as London and Windsor. Originality only seems to exist outside big cities in this part of the world.

The Canadian was two hours late arriving in Toronto, due mainly to the amount of freight trains which managed to hold us up throughout the day. Freight takes a higher priority to passengers in this country, mainly due to the fact that anyone who doesn't travel the ten feet to the shop at the end of the road by car is considered a big sissy. Actually walking downtown to the train station, getting on a train and being taken to your destination without having to press any pedals with your feet is an alien concept to most people over here, so the rail network tends to be mainly full of tourists and the few people who still have an ounce or two of romance left in them. On the way into Toronto, our train was forced to come to a juddering halt every few hundred yards in order to allow a hundred tons of Cornflakes to go past. In another train, obviously - a hundred tons of cornflakes going past in a giant bowl really would've been a sight.

Leonie is in First Class, which means that her cabin is hidden away in that mysterious part of the train beyond the locked door - the carriage guarded by the man with the stern look and the wiggly finger which says "Your name's not down, and you're not coming in". Despite inviting me back to her room a couple of times over the last two days (now, now, calm down - it's a lot more comfy in first class), we have somehow managed to fail spectacularly in sneaking past - guards on VIA Rail don't even fall for the old pointing in the other direction and running past trick that seems to work so well in films. What made this class segregation all the more ridiculous is that Leonie actually had to go off and pack up all her stuff while I stayed at the other end of the train, and was then forced to disembark at the correct First Class door so that she could be counted off. No, seriously, we were actually split up and told to disembark from specially allocated doors. We arranged to meet in the concourse of Union Station, and I settled back in my seat to watch the lights of the city approaching, trying not to imagine how large the station would be and how unlikely it was that we would actually be able to find each other again.

Since my hotel was closest, Leonie and I decided to drop all of our stuff off in my room rather than carting it around with us, and then go out to look for somewhere to get a coffee - something which is never a problem in North America, even if you arrive as we did in the middle of the night. This convoluted hotel luggage dropping off arrangement severely confused the hell out of our taxi driver, who helped us cart our luggage into the hotel, asking as he did how long we would be staying. The idea that we had both arrived at the hotel together but that I would be staying while Leonie would be going on to her own hotel later was clearly enough to make his head explode - but then I always find it quite good fun to convince the locals that you're completely mad whenever I arrive in a new city. The receptionist looked at us over his glasses as if something decidedly underhand was going on, and suggested that the best thing to do would be for Leonie to leave her luggage in their safe rather than taking it to my room, before asking how many keys I'd be needing as if this wasn't, in any way, a contradiction of attitude. It must be bloody hard to have a dirty weekend away with your secretary in this country, that's all I can say.

Across the road from the hotel was a quaint little coffee shop in typical North American style where we both ordered a cappuccino and a slice of cake just large enough to obscure our faces while eating it. We talked about our travel plans, used up what must have amounted to about half of the cafes stock of paper napkins making notes and drawing sketches of places to see and things to do, made plans to meet up in a couple of weeks when we both head south into the US, exchanged e-mails and finally noticed at nearly one in the morning that the staff were all standing around patiently pointing at their watches and waiting to lock up. One of the baristas (that's what they call the people that work in coffee shops, don't you know) offered to take a photo for us as we embraced in that warm way people over here like to do with people they've only met recently, and then managed to shake the camera so much that Leonie and I look as though we've swapped heads. Why is nobody ever able to take a good photo with somebody else's camera? I am absolutely convinced that if you met David Bailey in the street and asked him to take a photo for you with your camera, he'd probably forget to take the lens cap off.

Outside, we hailed a cab to take Leonie to her hotel and then stood on the pavement hugging for a quite unnecessary but very satisfying length of time while the cab driver tutted and raised his eyes to heaven several times as though he wasn't actually being paid for waiting. It doesn't matter how long you've known somebody over here, and how little time it will be before you see them again, parting is always an event best associated with hankies and running makeup. Still, I suppose that's my own fault for wearing so much makeup.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.