Travelling Home...

So, while my adventures travelling home were not quite as... adventurous as those going down, it still wasn't straight forward.

I had just over an hour between my flights at Chicago, so when I got a notice on my phone just before we left for the airport saying that my initial flight had been delayed by a half hour, I was worried. That was cutting my time to make my connection in half. Well, when I got to the airport in New Mexico, the lady at the United desk said, you've got less than 20 minutes to get to your flight to Ottawa in Chicago, there is no way you are going to make it and that's the last flight to Ottawa for the day.

Luckily, she also said, let me see how I can rebook you. So she found a flight to Houston that had room, and then Houston to Montreal and Montreal to Ottawa, putting me in Ottawa at 11:20pm instead of 8:30pm. But what was I going to do? She was pretty sure I wasn't going to make that connection in Chicago. So she rebooked me. The only rub was that it was now 10:55 and the flight to Houston left at 11:25 and I still wasn't through security. She in fact had to call and get them to re-open the flight so she could print my boarding pass!

So she hands over the boarding passes and says "Run for the gate!" So I do. Literally. Only slowed down for security, which was luckily not very busy at all. Got through that, didn't even bother to put my running shoes back on after security, just carried them as I ran for the gate, which was luckily A3, so fairly close. I was the last one to board, although I did join a line of people slowly making their way through the aisles to their seats, so I didn't hold them up.

Then in Houston I had to get from C to B (again I had less than an hour before boarding started). I had to walk and walk, then take the shuttle, then walk and walk. Luckily there was a Craft store because now it was about 7 hours since I had had breakfast and all I'd had to drink was a single glass of water on the plane. So I got a sandwich and a bottle of water and ate it in the 20 minutes I had to wait for boarding to start. The flight from Houston to Montreal was the longest one at about four hours and that would have been fine if they hadn't had the temperature set at about 5000 degrees. Unbelievably, the lady in the seat in front of me not only kept her coat on, but had her husband's covering her as well!

Montreal airport was great. If you have a connecting flight, you get to go to the far end of customs where there was one other guy and myself as opposed to the customs line everyone else had to take which was about 300 people long. So I got through customs really quickly, my bags were already on the conveyor when I got there, and as soon as you hand over your little customs form, you go up a clearly marked section and hand the air canada people your checked bags and go out. You do have to go through security again with your carry-ons and then my gate was at the ass end of this huge long underground corridor and there's no one on it with me and I'm like... okay. But I got to my gate and eventually they got the signage up. We had to walk out to the plane because it was a little Dash 8 -- so cute and small, but I have to say, the seats were the comfiest, and it had the most legroom of all my flights and it was a decent temperature and not hotter than the sun.

And I was sitting under the wing, not over it - how cool is that? I got to see the propeller's start and the wheels come up off the runway when we took off, then watched them get brought up and tucked away. Plus we'd barely gotten up and the seat belt sign off before it was being put on again as we were making our decent.

As fun as the last plane ride was, man was I glad to have landed and get home.

Now I have twenty million things to do, but it was a great three weeks and totally worth it.

I have to admit, though, I'm hoping my bad luck with flights has run out with this trip!


Sean
smut fixes everything
where the naughty boys come... and play