Welcome to the first day of the Furnal Equinox 2023 summary, told through submissions! Over the next week, I'll be doing my usual post-convention summary by sharing a photo a day from my time away, while recounting the events of the day on which the photo was taken, exactly two weeks ago:

You know you're tired when you gather your things to leave the house at 2:00am, wrap up warmly, put your backpack on, close the door quietly so as to not wake your Ukrainian housemate, lock the door, make it halfway down the street and realise...you've still got your slippers on. Still, even after that delayed start, I made it to the bus station catch my coach in plenty of time. As usual for the early morning service, the bus was mostly empty, so I found a double seat to myself, pulled my woolly hat over my eyes, and slept...

Arriving into Gatwick about 4 hours before the flight, and having mercifully been allowed to sleep for a good 5 hours on the coach, I got myself a leisurely breakfast in one of the airport restaurants, and made a phonecall to a white goods company to arrange a repair for my washer-dryer...as one does before leaving the country for a long weekend. :P I also picked up a bottle of Welsh whisky - you'll see why in a future post - which sadly made my backpack just heavy enough for the right shoulder strap to give way. Sad times - this was the bag I had been taking to FE for the past 6 years. With the gate announced, I made my way to my waiting flight - an Air Transat A321neo. Now, those of you who have followed my FE adventures before will know that I'm used to flying transatlantic on Air Transat on wide-body A330s. So, you may very well ask, how does the A321 - a narrow-body - match up? The answer: exactly how you'd expect.

The flight was full, and even with a window seat, I was cramped in pretty tight. For a 4-hour flight to Greece, this is just about manageable, but for a transatlantic flight to Toronto it was barely tolerable. Even so, I passed the time with a couple of movies, the pretty 'meh' in-flight meals, and with some nice views out of the window once we got over North America. Curiously, this is the first flight I've ever been on during which the pilot actually said "And if you look out of the left side of the aircraft...". In this case, it was Quebec City. I did get a shot of that, but my picture of the Isle of Wight came out better. :P

After a rather tiring flight to Canada, I wasn't really looking forward to the hell that is Toronto Pearson's customs hall - nightmarish memories of almost missing my flight last year came flooding back as I walked to the border control posts. So imagine my pleasant surprise when just 5 minutes later, I was breezing past the luggage carousels and on my way to the UP Express! I don't know what Pearson has done to change their customs processes, but goodness me, it has worked like a treat. ^^

A train ride later, and I had arrived at the Westin Harbour Castle shortly before 5pm. In the lobby, I met up with my dear friend  ursusarctos , who had just recently finished a very long drive from the Midwest, and who had also very kindly checked us into our room already. We headed up there, I dropped off my bags and unpacked, and we caught up for a short while. After a good chat, we returned to the lobby and convention centre, picked up our badges, and hung around for a bit observing arrivals. I had a nice catch-up with  catmonkshiro and  mothmonarch , briefly bumped into  hbruton and  sandyschreiber , along with  scani ,  S00t and  Kindle_Wolf. Initial catch-ups completed and badges obtained, I led Ursus to a nearby favourite watering hole - The Fox pub. There, the bear had his first Canadian poutine, and I had my first 'Canadian' beer over a rather large burger.

Back to the hotel, after a very long day coupled with very good food and very good company, Ursus and I chatted a bit more before turning in for the evening.