GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN

Remember the last line of my previous post?  It was a rhetorical question actually … “I can sleep on the plane, right?”

Wrong.  The answer is ‘wrong’.  Hard no.  I am not able to sleep on a plane.  Glad I’ve got that cleared up.

And also, you might recall on my airport adventure I misplaced a passport and nearly had to abandon my husband to the grumpy guy at Customs?  Well, that didn’t happen this time but I seem to enjoy extra adventure so we did something different, you know, just for fun.

Our departure date was for the end of March – definite ‘lamb or lion’ territory so as the day crept closer we watched carefully what Mother Nature was doing in southern Saskatchewan. We were quite pleased that she seemed to be keeping busy further west.  Seasoned travellers would not have been so reassured, but we were pure innocents in how a part day shutdown of an airport 1000 km away the day before your departure can turn the whole system upside down.  We are much wiser now.

West Jet warned us our flight to Calgary was delayed before we left home.  Halfway to Regina we were told it would be even later.  As we entered the city we were told there was no way to make our connecting flight and we should talk to a West Jet representative about other options.  The text sounded so matter-of-fact that all still seemed well with the world until we went up to the gal just opening up her work station for the day.  We told her our problem and she smiled and told us she would take a look at what she could do for us.  It might have been the only smile she managed all day.  She logged on and her eyes flew open wide, she made a valiant effort not to bite her lip, and she began to scroll.  When her co-worker arrived a few minutes later and told her “good morning!” she merely said “Is it? Take a look.”  He literally jumped back from his computer and cried “Oh my god!” like he was faced with a backed-up, overflowing toilet bowl.  Come to think of it, that’s probably a pretty good comparison.

The bottom line was that air travel in western Canada was at least six hours behind because Calgary had a snowstorm yesterday.  Our WJ gal couldn’t help us.  We left her to deal with growing lines of people desperate to get where they were supposed to be going.

I always feel a little inadequate when other people do all their own booking flights.  I have managed it for single domestic flights but I just feel so much more secure if I get a professional to take care of anything more technical … and this is the perfect example of why.  We called our friend and savior, Jaime, at McPhail Travel in Moosomin, told her our dilemma and she was on it instantly.  Within a half hour we were booked to fly east instead of west and get to Amsterdam almost the exact same time as our first flight was to arrive.  It was a little scary because we had to make another connection in Minneapolis but we survived and made it to The Netherlands before the tulips were done blooming!  One of the first things we did when we got home was buy Jaime flowers.

The way time zones and travel work is we were up at 5:00 to drive to Regina to catch a flight to Europe.  We left the prairies shortly after noon March 26 and landed in Amsterdam at breakfast time on March 27 but it’s only a ten hour flight.   The airlines provide meals(?) and attempt to control the lighting in the cabin so that humans can better manage the adjustment to the new time zone they will be landing in but really, there’s no saving humans from their folly.  We evolved as walkers and it’s pretty hard to hop time zones at a walking pace.  We are not built for this.

Long story short, we had a few days of sightseeing before our cruise started and if I hadn’t made notes of what happened those days they would be lost forever.  A sleep-deprived brain can barely function on a minute-to-minute basis, let alone recall events in any kind of order. 

I’ll check my notes and tell you all about it next time.