Toronto

A big "hello" to some of the young people of Flax Bourton school; particularly Oak Class!

It was a very long flight from Gatwick to Toronto - over 7 hours.  Spring is much later here than in past years.  As we flew in over Quebec province, the fields and woods were brown; the lakes were still white and frozen! There's a map here of Canada; we're on the Easternmost of the Great Lakes; fortunately, Lake Ontario isn't frozen - it only ever freezes around its edges anyway.  Here in the city the trees are just about beginning to break buds; in some of the gardens there are flowers in bloom, but it's patchy.

We spent yesterday (Friday) in the city.  There is an underground, called the subway, just as in London, but it's much straighter and doesn't wriggle around so much.  The train from St George Station southward doesn't have partitions between the coaches so that you can see all the way from the front to the back; weird!


We went to the Royal Ontario Art Gallery; they have a fantastic collection of pictures by some of our favourite Canadian painters - you can see some of their work here.

We're still waking early (05.15 Canadian) because the time is 5 hours behind Bristol!  So we're also very tired in the evening - 10.00pm here is 3.00 am in Bristol! But Skype is brilliant - some of the grandchildren have seen and talked to each other this morning and I've spoken to my parents, too.  If you think what it was like for previous emigrants; when they left Europe, they knew that hey might never see their families again.  It's so very different now.  We've even read bed-time stories to our grandchildren over Skype!