Our flight from Abbotsford was uneventful - everything went smoothly as usual. The flight of just over an hour to Edmonton and the flight to Toronto of 3 hours and 22 minutes seemed to be a breeze compared to some of our recent international flights. How TO has grown, having been somewhat of a regular traveler over the years I thought I had a good handle on Toronto's Airport - boy was I wrong - I didn't recognize it after only 5 years - what changes have been made.

As I mentioned earlier, our car rental went reasonably well as we ended up with an upgrade to an Infinity QX300 and it's pretty spiffy. I think we'll end up saving some fuel over that of the Ford Expedition that was originally offerred.

Today we were up a dawn, kinda surprising to me particularly with my sleeping patters in Abby, where I usually get out about 10:00 a.m. or 1:00 p.m. EST. Who knew. We headed out to Newmarket to spend some time with my son Aaron and my grand-daughter Hannah. It was nice to see them since it seems like forever since they visited out west. We got in some good "quality" discussions and I felt very good about our visit.

We walked to Hannah's school to pick her up from "Senior" Kindergarden and she remembered us right off - always a good sign. One Tracy got home from her two and one-half hour nightmare ride from her downtown office we thought we'd head out for burgers at a local eatery Ground Burger Bar and had a great dinner.

After a toast with some nice Scotch, we decided it was time for us to return to the big city so we headed along Davis Drive and came down 400 - taking us just about one hour to our hotel - this was compared to two and a half hours that it took us to get there this morning - this is definitely the way to go rather than up Hwy 27.

Our friends arrrive from Sydney via Hong Kong tomorrow night and we've said that we'd be there to meet them at the airport just to avoid any confusion on their part and then we'll head over to our new hotel for the next three days - Novotel North York. The plan is to spend a couple of days and then head out on the big adventure Monday morning.

It's good to be back home, the familiarity - CHUM-FM, the Toronto Star, all things that I've missed since being on the west coast. Toronto - you've changed - you've become huge and conjested but I still love you. Stay tuned, the pictures will start to follow shortly.