Tech Travel and Toronto

Traveling and tech go hand in hand for me. Our recent trip to Toronto might as well have been another case study on how useful tech can be throughout every major facet of traveling.

Incidentally, this trip marked the first time I decided against bringing my Macbook Pro laptop. Last year, for our trip to Italy, I brought my laptop for storing photos / videos recorded on my 16GB iPhone5.

For this trip, I brought along my 12″ iPad Pro (128GB model) and my iPhone 6s (128GB model) and a few USB / Lightning cables. The extra storage in my iPhone was more than enough to store all the photos / videos I took on our trip. I used the iPad in our hotel, mostly as a digital sketchbook.

For managing our travel itinerary, rental car, and hotel reservations, I used Kayak, which consolidates all of my travel information in one convenient app. I can’t recommend this app enough – it’s a must have for traveling.

For planning our sight-seeing activities as well as our hotel accommodations, we used TripAdvisor.

Roaming charges can be staggeringly expensive. I learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago when we traveled to Vancouver. Before traveling to Toronto, I signed up with Verizon’s Travelpass, which lets customers use their existing data / voice plan in Canada for an added charge of $2 per day per device. We made heavy use of our iPhones throughout our entire stay in Toronto, using our smartphones primarily as GPS devices to get around town. We also leaned heavily on the Yelp app to find good places to eat.

In speaking with a Verizon representative, I was led to believe that Travelpass would work automatically, upon arriving in Canada. This was clearly not the case, and I only discovered it as we picked up our rental car after arriving at the Toronto airport. We were driving in the wrong direction, without any GPS guidance, until Aarti – in a last ditch effort, turned on roaming so we could find our way back to our hotel. I was worried about the overages, but we had no choice. It turns out that Travelpass requires Cell Roaming to be ON – something that Verizon’s website failed to mention. It would have been nice to know this beforehand. On a side note, Aarti and I have become absolutely dependent on Google Maps. Traveling with an old school map is now completely out of the question for us.

With our Citypass, we visited the CN Tower, the Toronto Aquarium, the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), and Casa Loma, all at a discounted rate – compared to buying tickets for each attraction separately. In my view, the Toronto Aquarium and CN Tower are must-visits when you are in Toronto.

We enjoyed Casa Loma and the ROM as well. Both make for solid day trips.

As a chip off the old block, my daughter Sonia made extensive use of her iPad Mini to capture photos from the trip.

The highlight of our trip was Niagra Falls. We took the Hornblower Niagra Cruise (Canada’s version of the US Maid of the Mist) to get up close to the waterfalls. It was spectacular! Of course, I brought my iPhone to capture photos and video while on the cruise – aside from some mild water spraying, the iPhone handled itself like a champ.

We also visited Niagara on the Lake, a quaint, but charming town located about 20km from the falls. This was a hidden gem, offering some nice dining and shopping options. (Hat tip to reader David C. King for the suggestion!). I had the pleasure of meeting David, who met me wearing his original vintage (circa 1999!) PC Weenies T-shirt!

Our last main sight-seeing trip was to visit Centre Island, via ferry. We leisurely strolled the well manicured park and enjoyed a picnic in the afternoon.

We would put our devices on Airplane mode whenever they weren’t actively being used as GPS devices or restaurant finders. This tactic really helped conserve our devices’ batteries; they could last a full day without completely draining. We could charge our devices each night, thanks to our hotel room’s built-in USB / AC outlets. (More hotels need to offer this!)

Throughout our entire stay in Toronto, we enjoyed warm, sunny weather. It felt a lot like Tampa, minus the overbearing humidity we have in Florida. Of course, by the time we returned to Tampa from Toronto, our devices were completely dead. (And, incidentally, so were we.)

-Krishna

Krishna June 29, 2016 iOS, iPad Pro, iPhone6s, kayak, Toronto, TripAdvisor