Toronto

It was holiday time again, and we set off from Manchester to Toronto. We were using US Airways, which meant we had to change planes in Philadelphia en route, and only had about 90 minutes to get across the airport to make our flight. We did make it though, and were soon aboard the plane and pushed back from the gate. Unfortunately, that's as far as we got for the next 3.5 hours...

There was a massive thunderstorm in Philly, which meant we were eventually offloaded and sent back to the terminal, where we were informed we would now have a 24 hour delay. Now in Europe there are laws about these things, but in the US you get absolutely no help at all from the airline to find overnight accommodation, have a meal - in fact, they wouldn't even offload our luggage from the plane, so we were literally left with nothing but the name of a hotel to try. When we eventually found out how to get to the hotel, there was a queue of about 50 people ahead of us to check in. Finally, we were in a room, and walked down the street to a pizza place for some food at 10.30 pm!

Now to be fair, the TV news told us there's been 10,000 (yes, ten thousand!) lightning strikes in the Philadelphia area that night... but seriously, a 24 hour delay and all we were offered was a glass of water - the US needs to sort out looking after its travellers!

Naturally we were worried about whether our bags would make it to Toronto (since they were now on a different flight from us!), but luckily they were there when we arrived.

So we'd lost a day of our holiday, but Toronto was great. The Just for Laughs festival was on while we were there, which meant plenty of street entertainment. We trundled up to the Bear Night on the Friday, which was held in the open air on the patio of a cafe, which was novel, though we find the US and Canada's insistence on shutting everything down at 2am a bit strange!

Two highlights - an open-top city sightseeing tour with an excellent guide in glorious sunshine, where we got a bit pinked up; and our day tour to Niagara Falls. Yes, we picked the cheapest tour, so it was excellent value, but the tour guide on this one was chronically bad - to the point where he had a go at one of the other passengers while on the microphone to the whole bus! And SO, SO dull! No tip for him!