After taking the bus, skytrain and a hotel shuttle, we spent the night at a hotel close to the airport last night. This morning we took the hotel shuttle back to the airport. We have a friend that works for Air Canada (our carrier). I contacted her last night asking if she would be working today, she was 😉 . We plan to meet her for a little visit before our flight. The shuttle from the hotel was running a bit late and even if it was on time it would be tight for us to get our bag tags printed, drop the bags and get through security. Our wonderful friend texted and said she had printed our boarding passes and bag tags also put a magic sticker on our boarding pass that will give us a priority security line. We went through the priority door and entered the security area that was extremely busy. We were thinking this is going to take a while. Next thing we know a security person is holding back the other passengers and letting us in ahead of a very long line. WOW such a magic sticker! Really it was a very MAGIC friend!!!!

We arrived in Toronto to -8C and a wind. We are staying very close to the airport. We get there by taking the airport train to the Value Parking lot. From this station we walk across the parking lot, just 150 steps, but the wind is chilling. We are very happy to be heading to the equator tomorrow. Our hotel is called the Alt. It is a modern hotel with a European feel.

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It has a bar and food choices that can be microwaved. Not ideal, but we are not going back outside tonight. We choose a couple of their options and tuck in for the night.

We have seen on the local news that there is a nasty weather system expected for the afternoon rush hour tomorrow. Our flight is scheduled to depart at 3:20pm. Hopefully the storm doesn’t arrive early.

Tomorrow we will meet Greg and Leslie at the airport, after taking the airport train back. We will have an almost 6 hour flight to Bogota, an hour and half layover and an almost 2 hour flight to Quito the capital of Ecuador.

The weather forecast is not looking favourable. The week ahead in Quito has a lot of rain. We did pack the rain jackets, looks like they will not go to waste.

A nice start to this trip 🙂