Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

...but I've safely arrived in Toronto.

The next time I decide to have a night out before I need to leave the house at 4am to catch a plane, SOMEONE STOP ME!!

*grins*

I met up with therealsherbs in London for a mini-LbN meet, seeing as I was going to have to miss the big gathering today. There was booze and yakking and food and yakking and booze. Definitely booze. It was great to see Sherbs, we really did just talk our heads off about everything. And the lucky girl has to go out on the razz again today ;)

It had been planned that I'd get home no later than 9pm....We didn't leave the pub until gone 10pm!

I got in at midnight.

And I still had to pack. *meep*

Somehow I got organised and still managed to grab a couple of hours sleep before dragging myself out of bed at 4am to drive to Heathrow. The flight itself was all right and I was able to spend all of it if not fully asleep then at least in a pain free doze. Canadian customs didn't like me though, I had the whole triple check of luggage and the fifty gazillion questions. They were a lot friendlier about it than their US counterparts which was something :)

And now I'm here in Toronto. The sun's come out for me and I'm just about to head off towards the downtown area to see if I can find Rik and Carol's hotel. I found the internet cafe ok, you'll notice - happily there's a place 3 blocks down from the hotel. Hurrah!

The hotel is really nice, I'm very impressed with my room. Considering that was a last minute thing, I managed to get a good place. And there's a subway stop just up the road and an internet cafe just down the road. How about that for serendipity?

And now I go to seek caffeine and food. Oh yes. For these are necessary to my survival :)

Once I left the internet café, I decided to go exploring. I'd got a map of downtown by simple dint of vandalising one of the freebie magazines in the hotel room and tearing out a rather useful plan that not only had a street map on one page but helpfully showed where the hotels were on another. Having worked out where Rik and Carol's hotel was, I considered how to get there. "Oh," I thought "I can't be arsed to work out the subway today, I'll walk it! It's not so far, really..." This was big mistake Number One ;)

So I walked and walked and walked. Now my feet had been a little sore when I started, which I thought was crazy because I'd been sitting on my arse for most of the past 12 hours. By the time I got to the Delta Chelsea hotel, I was definitely a tenderfoot. The hotel was nice but it was a zoo that day - apparently they had a lot of conventions that finished/started that weekend because the foyer and the registration desk was a sea of people. I found a helpful concierge who suggested the best way to track Rik down was use the house phone. One phone call to a helpful operator later and I confirmed that they'd checked in but they were not in. I left a message and headed off in search of food. To my joy, just down the road I spotted a Hard Rock café. Great! Food and I could buy my obligatory HRC t-shirt! Hurrah!

A vast amount of burger and chips later, with t-shirt clutched in hand, I realised that there was no way I was going to walk back. I could wimp out and take a cab but there was a subway stop right next to the HRC. So I ventured down to the bowels of what appeared to be a shiny Shopping Centre and grappled with the subway system. Happily, it proved to be Mitchy-proof. All I needed to do was buy a token, put it in the entry barrier slot and go onto the platform. Sorted! Any journey, one way, anywhere on the system, including changing to another line or getting a bus, was $2.25. You could either buy the token by putting the right money in a machine or put the money into a little container by the ticket office and the person in the ticket booth would let you through the barrier. Simple. So simple, I could cope with it :) Ten minutes, 3 stops and one change of line later (very quick indeed!), I was back at Sherbourne Street and heading to my hotel.

Back in my room, I soaked my weary feet in a hot bath. The bathroom was large (I actually found out it was larger than the ones at the Delta Chelsea, even though that's a bigger hotel. Heh!) and the bath was nice and deep and wide enough for Fat Mitchy's, so naturally I gravitated towards it and duly snoozed peacefully in the tub for a while. I was pretty weary now, it was about 7.30pm Canadian time but my clock I'd been on the go for twenty hours. Thus it wasn't surprising that by 8pm, I said "Sod it" and crawled into bed. I was just dozing off when Rik phoned! Luckily I hadn't been fully asleep or I'd have not been coherent at all :) We nattered, compared journeys and then made arrangements to meet at the CN Tower at 1.30pm the following day.

Ten seconds after hanging up, I was totally and utterly unconscious, and didn't twitch until the following morning.