I flew from Calgary to Montreal today, so I am now in Montreal and currently sitting on Taylor's bed at the Lacey's house. The thought of sleeping in my apartment on a hardwood floor with no mattress, pillows, sheets, or blankets didn't really appeal to me and the Lacey's said that I was welcome to stay at their house. Once my boxes arrive in the next day or two, I'll have pillows and bedding and I can figure out some sort of bed for the time being.
Anyways, my day has definitely been a series of unfortunate events that is quite unbelievable!
8:00 am (MST):
After waiting at the Calgary airport in a check in line that seriously didn't move for at least 30 minutes, I was finally told that my flight to Toronto had been delayed an hour and a half because the crew had arrived later than expected last night and had been given a mandated rest of 12 hours (which is the amount of time required for a crew between flights).
So my 9:00 am flight was going to leave at 10:30 am, which would mean that I would miss my connecting flight to Montreal this afternoon. Not a big deal as I could just catch the next flight to Montreal, which only left 1 hour later. The only problem was that the agent couldn't give me a boarding pass for the flight to Montreal because the computer system wouldn't let her... so she said I would need to go straight to the gate in Toronto to get a boarding pass. And my luggage would hopefully continue on to Montreal...
4:10 pm (EST):
I get to the Toronto airport and go to my connecting gate to find out that the computer system has crashed, so I can't get a boarding pass and they can't board the plane.
5:30 pm:
They start to board the plane remotely (meaning they were doing it over the phone with an agent in another airport where the computers were working)... until the power went out in the airplane! How that is even possible, I have no idea, but they stopped boarding the plane and got everyone off of it because it was apparently dark and freezing.
6:00 pm:
The power was back on and they started to board the plane remotely again... for about 10 minutes until the power went out again!
6:30 pm:
The computer system was up and running, but we still couldn't board because there was still no power on the plane.
6:45 pm:
There is power on the airplane, so boarding begins again... for the third time!
7:45 pm:
All of the passengers have finally boarded the airplane... I have no idea why it took an hour! The captain then apologizes to everyone in first class for the fact that it is so cold up there, but they can't shut the door. The bridge crew had to leave to go to another plane that was ready to depart, and none of the flight crew knew how to shut the door... so we had to wait for the bridge crew to come back.
8:00 pm:
The bridge crew has returned and shut the door, but... when the truck came to do something or other that needed to be done to start the engines, the engine in the truck died. When the captain made this announcement, the entire plane burst into laughter. What are the chances that all of this could happen to one airplane in one day? So, anyways, we were waiting for another truck to come.
8:15 pm:
The truck came, the engines were started, and away we went to the runway.
9:15 pm:
The plane lands in Montreal and all of the passengers are waiting to get off when... the captain tells us that the engines are still running and they are waiting for whoever has to come and turn them off (or something like that).
9:30 pm:
I'm off the plane and I find my luggage, which appears to have been waiting at the airport for quite some time (it was sitting in a pile of yet unclaimed baggage). I'm not sure when it arrived, but perhaps it flew on my original flight from Toronto to Montreal, which was probably also delayed due to the computer system confusion in the Toronto airport.
9:45 pm:
Ang and Rachel pick me up at the airport and we begin making our way home until... we take a wrong turn and end up somewhere not close to home. We did see a sign for New York, so we were going towards the US border.
I'm not quite sure what time I got to the Lacey's house, but here I am! All in one piece and none the worse for my adventures of the day. I will say this though – I met a lot of really neat people today... the people I spent three hours with in the Toronto airport, the woman from Whitehorse, the guy from Chicago who bought me some food when he went to get something for himself, the couple who were going to London, England, the man who let me use his cell phone when mine died and I needed to call Ang to tell her where I was (still in Toronto), the guy from Austria who sat beside me on the flight to Montreal... all people who helped turn what could have been a horrible day into one that was actually quite amusing.
As the Austrian said when we were sitting in the plane waiting for the truck to come to start the engines (or whatever it was that needed to be done), it was all a test of our patience, self control, and sense of humour. So true, so true... and this was coming from a guy who had been up and traveling for 20 hours by that point and still had a 3 hour drive in a shuttle bus to get to his destination tonight! Despite his obvious exhaustion, he was still smiling and cheerfully waved goodbye to me when he saw me in the baggage claim area.
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