Air Canada Boeing 777 (Photo Vismay Bhadra, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dear Readers, well, here I am on the other side of the Atlantic, having made the trip from Heathrow to Canada in 6 hours and arriving into Lester Pearson Airport a whole hour early. Holy Moly! Usually it’s the return leg from Toronto to London that gets the tailwind, so this was very satisfactory, even though we did have to wait half an hour for a gate which takes the shine off a tiny bit.

I have to tell you about the Captain, though. When his voice came through the cabin, I had one thought:

‘Barry White is piloting this plane’.

For those of you not familiar with Barry White, he had one of the deepest voices in popular music. He was also a large chap, and was nicknamed ‘The Walrus of Love’ (rather unkindly I thought).

Barry White (Photo by Fotograaf Onbekend / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

And you get the general idea about his voice here.

Anyhow, the captain then proceeded to tell us the flight path, and named every one of his Fantastic, Wonderful team, from Toby the co-pilot via Cheyenne in charge of the in-flight service and about twenty other people, which was extremely sweet, especially when delivered in a voice that had more than a touch of maple syrup and smoke about it.

I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t do the usual and name all of the different languages spoken by the crew, because Air Canada staff usually have at least ten between them, and I’m sure this crew were no different.

And they had apple and maple syrup pancakes for breakfast!

And we were sitting in a row with just two seats, instead of the usual three – this is great because normally I end up in the middle as John has to have an aisle seat for various reasons.

And finally we whizzed through customs (if you’re travelling to Canada any time soon, it’s worth noting that you can do all the customs form stuff in advance, and then you can just whisk through the express lane. I do love an express lane.

And now here we are at our usual hotel (Cambridge Suites) where we’ve stayed every year for the past 21 years, and the sun is shining. But as I’ve been up since 4 a.m. this morning I’m going to spare you any more random impressions for now. You’ll be reading this on Tuesday, by which time I will have experienced my first ever solar eclipse, so watch this space!