DAY 1-Tuesday March 4th,2008

(See photos at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43892&l=7f507&id=562630970
You do not need a Facebook account for this. It is a public link. )

On Monday, the day before we left to head to Toronto on our way to Beijing, at 3:00pm, we got a message from our agency, saying that the Orphanage donation in Julia's province had gone up from $3000 USD to $5000 USD. In the dozen years the agency has been in business, this has apprently never happened. No notice, just by the way, make sure you've got an extra $2000. Not cool.

So we made our way to the bank to ask them if there was any way of finding us the cash to be able to proceed. we were completely tapped out and really couldn't afford this blow....
But the Royal Bank in Summerside, as always, came through for us. They are absolutely phenomenal. We are sao thankful to them for being there when we need them. They actually opened up a hapf hour early the next day, to sit down with us and find a way to make this work. We are forever grateful to Boyce and Mike for being incredibly amazing!

Off we went to Toronto. The flight from Charlottetown was fun. We had the Mayors of Summerside and Charlottetown on our flight as well as a councilor and the Deputy Mayor of Summerside and the former Chief Justice of the province of PEI.

In Toronto, we navigated through the airport, then took the terminal shuttle, which took us to the hotel. It's attached to Terminal 3. We then checked into the lovely Sheraton Gateway Hotel. At 5:30, our friend Anna Gustafson picked us up and took us into town. We had a lovely chat with her, and are very appreciative of her taking the time to cart us around.

Anna dropped us off at Zorba's where Nikki Payne was waiting for us (again, Nikki, we're really sorry to have made you wait!!!) We were later joined by other friends, including Maria Ramirez, Johnny Legend, Jo-Anna Downey, and Diana.

We had a lovely meal before proceeding to the Eton House Tavern for a Comedy Show, which, thanks to Jo-Anna Downey, turned out to be a bit of a Showcase for us. It was nice to see some comics we wouldn't normally get to see.

After the show, we hung out for a bit, and then headed back to the hotel by Subway. Andrew Evans, Jo-Anna Downey and Cal Post also took that subway with us. Then we took a bus from the subway station back to the hotel. When we got there, we had trouble finding the entrance to the hotel, going up the parking garage levels until we reached the top one, before taking the elevator back down to where we should have gotten off the first time around, lol.