Last week, myself, Grant Smith, The Yeti and Mike Taylor (who we were meeting for the first time), went to Toronto for the week. Mike, as the pro, was going to be riding in the Metro Jam, I was going to be taking photos and covering the event, Grant was trying to sell as many t-shirts as possible and Yeti was planning to drink himself blind. This is the first instalment of the tour diary...

THURSDAY:

Woke up at 5am. Got some breakfast and went over to Grant's, where he used the extra space in my bag to jam in loads of his stuff. Yeti came round shortly after, we hopped in a black cab and were off to the airport.

Got to the airport and checked in. Yeti and Grant decide that, since we were on holiday, we should have a drink at the bar. Three beers later, we were on the plane.

Flew to Manchester, where we picked up Mike. Everyone had to get off the plane, so we used this time to sink another two, this time in the company of Mike.

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The flight over to Canada was pretty uneventful and the films were rubbish. Grant spent the flight sleeping off the beer, which was a good thing, because he was our driver.

Got to Toronto, picked up the hire van and spent too much time trying to find the hotel. When we found the hotel, we found out that the brochure had 'embellished' a little when describing its positive qualities. Ah, well.

Had a shower and headed out for some tea, feeling pretty rough.

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Made it to a Tex Mex bar where we were introduced to a local beer . After half a pint, I turned to Grant and said:
'At this point [pointing to 1cm down the glass] I was feeling rough. At this point [pointing to 3cm down the glass] I thought I was going to be sick. But now, I feel great!'
Our food arrived and to our delight Yeti's meal was a bowl of molten, s*** brown lava. Some evil swines then thought it'd be even funnier to add copious amounts of Tabasco sauce to it whilst he was away to the toilet. Haha.

After leaving the restaurant, we went across the road to a bar, where Grant began shouting:
'This town's crap! The bars are all empty, what's goin' on?!'
A cry that was met with the line:
'It's 6.30pm on a weekday, numbnuts - they're only just out of work.'

Ah, jetlag.

At some point, one bright spark realised that if we kept on drinking until midnight, then we would have been on the sauce for 24 hours. There's nothing like a challenge to bring out the best (or worst) in a man!

At some point, Mike left to go back to the hotel and we thought Yeti had gone too (although he actually hadn't, and ended up wandering the streets looking for a Chinese take-away). I was up for shooting through as well, but we'd promised this girl that we'd go and see her band, so we ended up walking for what seemed like miles to get to this bar. Once there, against all odds, I played pool against some guy who was even worse than me (woo hoo!).

We got a taxi home from a very excitable taxi driver who nearly battered another driver for trying to steal his fare.

The writing was on the wall, really...

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