Saturday 28^th June 1997: At 10.30am Ingrid's parents took us to Schiphol airport by car. While Ingrid's dad was looking for a place to park the car, we did the check-in procedure. At the counter we were asked if it was ok with us to depart one day later (with compensation of course), because the plane had been over-booked. We did not want to do that, so we were definitely going to leave today. The four of us had lunch at the Panorama restaurant and then we said goodbye and proceeded to gate E8. At the boarding counter we arranged for us to be seated next to each other, which was not the case before. After we went on board the plane did not take off right away, because one of the freight doors did not close completely. After one and a half hours of delay we finally left for Toronto at about 3.45pm. The biggest KLM plane was brought into action for this flight, a Boeing 747-400 with two passenger floors. About an hour later, the purser surprised us by offering us a glass of champagne with a complementary small geneva-holding Delft blue house. There were no bigger ones available at the time, but when we gave him our postal address we should be sent a bigger one, which they did. Here are some flight details: distance 6,000 kms, maximum speed over 950 kms/h, duration 6 hrs 50 mins, outside temperature -50ºC, time zone difference: when 6pm in the Netherlands → 12pm in Ontario/Québec. The main movie aboard was Dante's Peak about the destruction of an American town because of the eruption of a nearby volcano. There was also some tv-comedies like Seinfeld, Mad About You and Mr Bean. We landed safely and after we reclaimed our luggage, we went through customs. The arrival hall is constantly supervised by drugs dogs; all our suitcases and bags were snuffled and slimed. At the Toronto International airport our rental car was already waiting for us. We asked for a detailed Toronto city map and we were on our way to our very first hotel of our honeymoon, the Delta Chelsea Inn in Gerrard Street West (near Yonge Street) in downtown Toronto. We had a bit of trouble parking the car, but after we checked in to the hotel we had a north view from the 7^th floor. We had some pizza with a at the Market Garden restaurant and then we fell asleep - completely worn out.

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