Dave's sister, Karen, VERY kindly bought tickets for the two of us with her United Miles, and with the summer rush in full swing by the time Rio was out of school, the best options for flying out on mileage award tickets were on an airline I had never flown before, Air Canada.
We had a bit of an unusual itinerary, which began by flying out of Frankfurt bound towards Toronto at 5:00 pm on Friday. Our little A330 was the smallest aircraft than I have been on crossing the Atlantic since the 90s.
It was comfortable though, and every seat had a blanket and pillow and a very good in flight entertainment system with a huge selection of movies to choose from. We had a particularly good, by flight standards, chicken dinner (though ab it small) and another hot (but very small) wrap style snack before heading in for our landing at Toronto airport about 7:30 pm their time. That's eight and a half hours in flight for us, by the way.
The pilots did an awesome job bringing us in rather smoothly in a severe thunder storm that had the airport on "red alert" and kept other planes from taking off until things cleared up. Since take offs were delayed, there was no available gate to go into after landing, so we spent about 45 minutes siting out on the runway waiting for things to get moving again. It gave me time to finish my movie!
I'm not sure if it was the weather, a customs issue, or what, but we ended up waiting over an hour for all of the luggage to be brought off the plane. You cannot leave customs without your bags, and I was sure wishing they had vending machines in there for hungry travelers! Even more though, I was relieved we did not have to rush to a connection--lots of people were sure they were missing flights.
Which brings us to what made this itinerary a bit unusual. Our connection was not until the following morning at about 8:30. I have never actually spent the night in route before, but it worked pretty well and I think it helped us with the jet lag.
After we finally got our bags, we were so tired that we ended up just grabbing some ice cream in the hotel gift shop to stop our tummies from rumbling just long enough to fall asleep, and then we headed up to our rooms.
I had booked us a room at the on sight Sheraton--and it was NICE to not have to catch a shuttle, etc to get to our hotel. The hotel was pretty, with a friendly staff and a big room with a comfortable bed.
I would absolutely stay there again in the same situation--being right on site was so worthwhile for our 11 hour layover (which, by the time we cleared customs and then needing to get checked in the next morning at least 2 hours ahead to pre clear US customs and immigration, left us 7 hours of time in between). That said, if I happened to be flying out of YYZ early and just wanted to overnight near the hotel, but dd not have a full connection, I'd probably look at a nearby off sight option. There were a number of minor glitches: I had booked a room with two full beds. We got (as you can see) one king. The front desk told me that at check in. They brought it up and told me that only booking directly through Sheraton are really the style of room booked, we booked through Expedia. The room smelled somewhat of stale smoke. There had been an attempt to clean it, but it still smelled. The ice machines were behind locked doors. Only crew staying in the hotel had keys. This is really confusing since signs direct you to the room, but then you cannot get in. Luckily a housekeeper came by and let me in to get some ice. Check in took 20 minutes because they only had one person checking people in, even though there were only four people in line in front of me. The prices in the gift shop were outrageous; we spent $15 on an ice cream sandwich, small package of M&Ms and a soda (but we needed to eat a little something and get sleep more than I needed to save money looking elsewhere). None of those things were a big deal, but they add up enough that unless I were in a connection situation again, I would not return.
Saturday morning, we were up at 5:30 and out of the hotel by 6:00. We managed about 5-6 hours of sleep, which really was quite good.
We checked in, and had a minor issue in which Air Canada's system wanted to force us to pay for our checked bags--somehow having crossed midnight with our layover made it look like a separate reservation from our German flight--and Canada to US flights do not get any free checked luggage. The agent completely agreed with us that we were within the policy for free bags, and did work it out, but it took 15 or so minute to come up with a work around.
We knew we were likely to run into issues (we had also learned on Thursday night that we were listed as "standby" in spite of having booked this in February!)--so we made sure we arrived with plenty of time to work everything out.
Toronto is one of the Canadian airports that has US customs and immigration clearance on the Canadian side, so that you go through all the rigmarole first and then just walk of the plane as if it were a domestic flight after landing. That went really smoothly. The were processing people really quickly, and moving a huge mount through. I was impressed.
Once on the other side of security, we headed right for Tim Horton's; I used to really like their donuts when we lived in Detroit.
They were a popular place! It is a good thing we still had an hour before boarding started:
We got lucky, and DID make it on the flight, and even got to sit in bulkhead for the 3 and half hour flight to Denver.
So, by lunch time we had made it and were happily enjoying the lovely view of the Boulder Flatirons from my in law's home:
Look out for US adventures coming soon!
--Hadley
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