We checked out of the hotel and were pleased to find that Ian and Gillian’s car easily took our bags. Then they drove us into Toronto to a carpark that they had pre-booked. This worked really well for them and they will use this method again.

Gillian and Ian had been told by locals that this is the busiest long weekend of the year and traffic home would be awful. Hence we decided to just do things in the city area and not try to get to Fort York.

We had a coffee then a roundabout walk to the CN tower. We saw a number of places of interest on the way, and took a number of photos.

The CN tower is 553.3 m-high and a communications and observation tower located in Downtown Toronto. Built on the former Railway Lands, it was completed in 1976.Gillian was at University when it was being built and watched it grow over time. Its name "CN" originally referred to Canadian National, the railway company that built the tower.

The CN Tower held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure for 32 years until 2007 and was the world's tallest tower until 2009.  It is now the ninth tallest tower in the world and remains the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere.

It is a signature icon of Toronto's skyline and attracts more than two million visitors a year. You can also pay to walk around the outside – we didn’t.

It was a cloudy day, but as our only previous visit to Toronto it was raining we had never been up the tower. It was good to go up with locals, as Gillian especially could point out many points of interest. She pointed out the high buildings in the financial district but the best views were south to the lake. There is even a small airport on an island opposite and we could see some of the ferries going over to it.

We were very lucky with the timing. We had a very short wait to buy tickets and the queues inside took about 30 minutes, which passed quite quickly as we chatted and looked at the various displays. When we left, the queues outside were long and the inside queue had added extra runways so we guessed it would have taken about 4 times longer.

Once down we walked to the Eaton Centre to have a late lunch in the food court. We had remembered from the previous visit the series of underground walkways and shops, but it was nice to walk through here.

We then walked to the nearby town halls. The old town hall had an interesting cache but it was difficult so we are not sure if we did it properly.

I really liked the old hall and it has an interesting history. Toronto's Old City Hall was one of the largest buildings in Toronto and the largest civic building in North America upon completion in 1899.Designed by prominent Toronto architect Edward James Lennox, the building took more than a decade to build and cost more than $2.5 million (equals close to 53 million today). It was constructed of local sandstone, grey stone and brown stone. Angry councillors, due to cost overruns and construction delays, refused E. J. Lennox a plaque proclaiming him as architect for the completed building in 1899. Not to be denied, Lennox had stonemasons "sign" his name in corbels beneath the upper floor eaves around the entire building: "EJ LENNOX ARCHITECT AD 1898”. He also arranged for gargoyles to be made in the image of the councillors with the main one in his own image and looking very stately.

The new one has a part that looks like a spaceship with 2 other tall curved buildings alongside. The pool area in the front freezes in winter which is why the nearby building has skates to hire – but not at this time of the year. It was nice, but not as imposing as the original.

We had a reasonably smooth trip to Trenton, except for one area where 2 lanes were closed. This was because of an accident and we could see it had involved a number of cars (possibly more than 10) with a series of nose to tails.

We stopped at Gillian and Ian’s favourite steakhouse on the way home to their house. We could be seated immediately in the lounge area which was better than the 75-minute wait for the dining room. Gillian and I revisited our cruise days with Pina coladas each.

Once we were home we were soon into bed after a quick tour of their home. They have worked hard to repaint and renovate but are now nicely settled in.