Scare Canada ?

Posted under Thailand 2008

Okay I lied, — well not really a lie but sort of an unintentional little fib. I sort of inferred that the last entry would be the last entry, and here I am again. Had to tell you about the final bits of our journey. Up at 0600 in Bangkok so that we could make our flight to Hong Kong and then our connecting flight to Vancouver and Victoria. All went swimmingly well on our Cathay Pacific portion to Vancouver. They gave us hot food, new warm sockies for our tired feet, our choice of many movies and the did not lose our luggage. In fact, we flew with a number of airlines in Thailand, to a number of different airports, both large and small, and nobody lost our luggage and the flights were on time. Well guess what — remember my whining about our national carrier, Air Canada? You guessed it, but let me not get ahead of myself.

We arrived unscathed, at Vancouver International, at 11:30. Now this is about 1:30 in the morning of the next day to us, but we are back. The one minor glitch that we have is the next leg of our trip, the 20 minute flight to Victoria is scheduled for 21:30, or 9:30 at night. A rather long wait, after a long flight, but as Air Canada Jazz fly to Victoria nearly every hour so we hoped to bump our flight up a bit. Well we cleared luggage through customs, (all our luggage) without mishap, and hand delivered them to Air Canada. At this time, the agent kindly changed our departure time to the scheduled 2:00 flight. We removed the baggage tags which were installed in Bangkok and replaced them with genuine Air Canada tags, for the remaining 20 minute flight. On we went to our departure lounge to await our 2:00 flight. About 13:30, Air Canada made an announcement to the effect that there were some maintenance issues with our intended aircraft, and so the flight was canceled. The silly passengers would be shoe-horned onto the following flights, and this would be accomplished alphabetically. Our name should have been Aardvark rather than Roberts because when Bonnie checked for our new time, we were back to 9:30 at night. Other than feeling particularly sorry for ourselves, or trying to recover our luggage and make our way to the ferry, we were at a bit of a loss, so decided to await the results of the 3:00PM flight. Wellll, we didn’t make the 3:00 but Air Canada announced that things were going so well that they would probably have the backup cleared by the 4:00 or 4:30 flight. Now the 4:00 was delayed and the new departure time would be 4:10, then 4:20, then 4:30. In the meantime, they had apparently found another plane, and were going to toss it into the mix and really clear up the backlog. Now we have the delayed 4:00, the 4:30 and the extra plane all slated to depart at 4:00. Fortunately, Air Canada seem to dash about in constant confusion, as our 4:30 flight didn’t leave until 5:15. We did make it to Victoria unscathed, and just when I was beginning to feel less sorry for myself, I tried to find our luggage. Wrong, — it ain’t gonna happen. It has magically disappeared in a 20 minute flight. The lost luggage ladies, who were actually quite pleasant, assured me that our luggage would indeed show up on one of the subsequent flights. The 9:30 PM flight being the final one. After trying to check on our luggage via phone, and finding out that we were talking to a lady in India, who did not yet have it listed into the system, we drove back to the airport. We were there but our luggage still wasn’t, and the next flight was the last flight, the 9:30, which was now arriving at 11:30. Well the end result was we did get our luggage at 11:30. All is well that ends well. It seems that when we got our new departure time in Vancouver our luggage was re tagged with a 21:30 flight, so it patiently sat in Vancouver, waiting for its flight, which was late anyway. All this now clocked up to about 31 hour on the go. Need some Rip Van Winkle time.

Oh well, the vacation still was great.