Day 25 - Pittsburgh to Toronto - Monday 30th August

We spent the day preparing ourselves for the night time trip to Toronto. It's a distance of 350 miles and we booked to go by Greyhound Bus.

During the morning we packed and tried to remove any evidence of ourselves from our hosts house. Then we were collected at 4:00 pm by Cheryl and taken to the bus terminal in downtown Pittsburgh. What we hadn't realised was, that there would be so many stops and transfers on this trip. The idea was that we would travel by night, the boys would be asleep and that we would arrive in Toronto at dawn. What happened was that we left at 6:15pm and the first stop was at 9:15pm. Here we had to get off the bus and wait 2 hours in the bus terminal (not sure where we were but it could have been Erie, P.A.) for the next connection. They had helpfully provided some arcade video games for us to play with but after we had spent about CND$6 on games (that were 25cents a pop) we had done them all. Daddy showed them all how to play Pacman, getting the highest score of the day. After all I must have spent a fortune on this game when it first came out in the mid to late '70s and I hadn't lost the knack!

Our next bus left and took us for another couple of hours to drive to buffalo, N.Y. We arrived here about 1:30am. By this time the boys had been asleep and we now wide awake again. This led to some interesting situations. Buffalo bus terminal is actually a very fine place. At least I think it would be during the day. When you are trying to manage 2 boys who have suddenly come back to life at 2:00am in the morning and you feel like hell, it's the worst place in the world.

Got on the next bus around 3:30am and got everyone settled for the final journey to Toronto. Only to be turfed off the bus some 30 minutes later as we arrived at the border point. All off the bus again with all our luggage, go through customs, get back on the bus, try to get to sleep, arrive in TO, find a train to take us to Oakville, get a cab back home and arrive there at about 7:30am. We all slept until midday!