Two Days in Toronto

A brief stop, well used

In May 2017 we spent two days in Toronto, staying at the DoubleTree by Hilton Toronto Downtown. Two days isn’t much time for a city of Toronto’s size, but a short downtown stay like this works well when you pick a central base and let walkability and transit do the rest, rather than trying to spread yourself across the whole metro area.

The CN Tower as the obvious first stop

Toronto’s skyline is defined by the CN Tower, and it’s the kind of landmark that more or less demands a visit on a first trip. The observation deck gives a genuinely wide view over the city and Lake Ontario, and it’s an easy way to get oriented early in a short stay — once you’ve seen the layout of downtown from above, the rest of the city makes more sense on the ground. It’s an iconic structure by any measure, and the kind of sight that a two-day itinerary can’t reasonably skip.

On a clear day the views stretch well out over Lake Ontario and the harbor islands, and seeing the grid of downtown streets laid out below made it much easier to picture how the rest of our short stay would fit together, from the harborfront up toward the Distillery District and the market beyond it.

The Distillery District’s Victorian streets

We spent part of our second day in the Distillery District, a genuinely well-preserved area of Victorian-era industrial buildings that’s since been converted into a pedestrian-only arts, dining, and shopping district. The old brick warehouses and cobblestone lanes give it a different character from the glass towers downtown, and because cars aren’t part of the equation there, it’s an easy, unhurried place to wander for an afternoon.

St. Lawrence Market for food

St. Lawrence Market rounded out our short list of stops — a well-known food market with vendors covering everything from fresh produce to prepared foods, and a good place to get a sense of Toronto’s food culture in a single visit rather than piecing it together across multiple restaurant meals. For a short trip, a market like this is efficient: a lot of variety in one place, without needing to research and book individual restaurants. We treated it as a grazing lunch stop, working through a few different stalls rather than committing to a single sit-down meal, which suited the pace of a two-day visit well.

Why Toronto works as a short stop

Two days is a tight window for any major city, but Toronto’s downtown core is compact and well-connected enough that it doesn’t feel like a losing proposition the way it might in a more sprawling metro area. The CN Tower, Distillery District, and St. Lawrence Market alone gave us a satisfying, if necessarily partial, sense of the city without requiring more time than we had. We left knowing there was plenty more we hadn’t seen, but that’s the honest trade-off of a two-day stop rather than a full week, and it didn’t diminish what we did get to.

A reasonable stopover

We built this into a longer North American itinerary, and Toronto worked well in that role — close enough to other regions to make sense as a stopover, but substantial enough on its own that it didn’t feel like just a layover with a hotel attached. If you’re routing through eastern Canada or the northeastern United States, a couple of days in Toronto is a reasonable way to break up a longer trip rather than just changing planes.

Practical notes

Toronto’s downtown is genuinely walkable, and the streetcar and subway network fill in the gaps well for anything a bit further afield, so a car isn’t necessary for a short downtown-focused stay like ours. May weather in Toronto is generally mild and pleasant, good walking weather without the humidity that can make a Toronto summer more of a slog, which made covering our short list of sights comfortable rather than a chore.

[Editor’s note: add what these two days actually meant to you both — the CN Tower view, the Distillery District wander, whatever stuck with you — and swap in your own photos when ready.]