Midwest and Great Lakes Autumn Adventure

Leg 4 - 10/23/2023 - Niagara Falls, NY (KIAG) to Toronto, ON (CYTZ)

Leg Stats

• Time Enroute: 0.9 hrs
• Distance (direct): 37nm
• Distance (actual): 88nm
• Fuel Used: 9.2 gal

The night before at the hotel, I called CBSA and did all the eAPIS / flight plan filing stuff, and we had decided that we'd aim to depart around 9:30am, and planned to arrive in Toronto around 10am after the short flight. We woke up before sunrise and decided to walk down to the falls from our hotel and get an up close view. We had a great time walking around the park, along the falls, and we watched the sun rise on the very crisp, clear morning. After that, we checked out of our hotel and took an Uber to the airport and I started on preflight.

Unfortunately, although it was 'only' in the mid 30s in the morning, it had been a bit colder overnight, and there was a pretty solid layer of frost on almost every surface of the airplane, and a decent amount of clear ice on the wings. I started on my preflight and repositioned the airplane into the sun so that the rapidly rising temps and sunlight would help melt everything off. By the time I was done preflighting, the frost and ice was melting off rapidly, so I went back inside to wait out the rest.

Around 9:15am I came back out and the airplane was totally clear of frost and ice, so we loaded up and got started. We got our clearance and departed quickly, and managed an on-time departure, on schedule for my customs slot in Canada. ATC initially wanted to send me across Lake Ontario, but then the first controller asked if I really wanted to do that (I did not). So they gave us vectors along the shoreline towards Hamilton and then back towards Toronto. We were vectored for the visual to runway 26, which provides spectacular views of downtown Toronto and the CN Tower. (Meanwhile, my G3X was chirping "Terrain, Pull Up!" the entire time!)

I felt fortunate that I had called ahead and reserved a spot as I pulled into the extremely busy STOLPort FBO at Billy Bishop Airport to wait for customs. Before I even got off hold with customs, they had hooked my airplane up to a tug and maneuvered us into a very tight parking space. We were cleared over the phone with no issues, and we grabbed our stuff and walked through the pedestrian tunnel into the city to grab an Uber to our hotel. It was a beautiful day, so we decided to do some sightseeing, and we left Magic at the hotel and headed to Casa Loma to explore a bit.

We spent the next couple days in Toronto enjoying the unseasonably warm and sunny weather, and enjoyed some of the awesome restaurants in downtown Toronto. (Including a great vegan Mexican restaurant and some amazing ramen) We found a pretty nice little dog park with the help of a friendly local lady, and took some photos by the very cool fountain that features lots of statues of dogs and cats. After that we made the very long walk to the Distillery District around sunset.

Trip Leg Navigation