This is the Start of an Adventure?

Canada would not make it easy to leave its icy grip. It made my departure as difficult as possible. It was truly a costly, frustrating, and stressful day. I have to hope that it gets better from here.

The weather today was royally craptastic. There was a big winter storm that blew through southern Ontario during the afternoon today. It dumped a lot of snow and freezing rain.

I started the day in Woodstock. My dad and I were going to drive to the airport in Toronto (normally about a ninety minute drive) in his old van. We were going to meet my sister at the airport, since she was coming separately from Toronto. Because of the crap weather, we gave ourselves a LOT of spare time. My dad and I were going to leave Woodstock at noon. We planned to meet my sister at 3 PM. Our flight was scheduled to leave Pearson Airport at 6:20 PM. The first flight segment would take us from Toronto to Los Angelese. After a two hour layover in LAX we'd fly directly to Sydney. We had lots of time to get to the airport, weather be damned.

The drive to the airport was very difficult. It was slow going. It was snowing the whole time. The road was slippery and it was hard to see. We never actually got to drive very fast. Finally, the crappy crap thing happened. I lost control of the van and we actually swerved into the centre median. Crunch! It happened in slow motion, but it happened so fast, too.

No one was hurt. A tow truck showed up within a minute and took us to an OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) station in Milton to report our accident. It was unfortunate that the van was wrecked, but our trip was not in jeopardy. We still had time to get to the airport. It was a good thing that we gave ourselves so much time.

We called a taxi to take us the rest of the way to the airport. The taxi ride was a joke, though. As soon as we got into the taxi, the driver got out and started fiddling with the driver's side windshield wiper. In the process, it seemed like he broke it. I'm not kidding. He brought the wiper into the car and kept fiddling with it. He asked us if we knew how to fix it. Again, I'm not kidding. Could I be making this up? He asked a tow truck driver who happened to be hauling another wreck into the police station (our van was long since towed away to an impound lot... I still don't really know exactly where it is!), but that guy wasn't useful either. So the taxi driver drove to the taxi company headquarters for help. Thankfully, he hadn't started running the meter yet.

He got himself and his windshield wiper sorted out and we were on our way. It still took a while to get to the airport. The fare was $90, and we didn't make it to the airport until almost 4:30 PM. So yeah, normally it takes an hour and a half to drive to the airport. Today, it took four and a half hours and cost us one Chevy Astrovan.

The airport check-in, customs, and security process went very smoothly, to be honest. Compared to what already happened, what else could go wrong? We had been checking the flight schedules all day and all signs pointed to our flight still being ontime. It looked like things were finally going to go our way.

Once we got through security, we ate the sandwiches that my mom had made us, drank lots of water and found ourselves some expensive airport beers. We had made it to our gate with time to spare.

However, unlike us, our plane did not make it to the gate on time. It was about twenty minutes late. We had to board the plane about an hour later than normal. When we got on the plane, we discovered, much to our pleasant surprise, that we had got assigned to exit row seats. We had a huge amount of legroom. It seemed like things were finally looking up for us. Sure, we got onto the plane an hour late, but our 5.5 hour flight to LA would be pretty comfortable.

We took our seats and proceeded to wait. And wait. And wait. After sitting on the plane for about an hour the pilot announced that the First Officer for the flight was delayed and would not be able to help fly the plane to Los Angeles. In fact, they were having a tremendously difficult time find a First Officer at all. There was ONE GUY (!!!!!) who would be coming off of a flight "soon" who might be able to join the crew for our flight.

At this point, I called Patrick who helped me discuss options for what we would do when we actually got to LA. There was no way we would be able to make our connecting flight to Sydney from LA. It turns out that there wouldn't be any likely flights that could carry us to Sydney until Sunday evening. We would end up getting to Sydney about 24 hours after we were originally supposed to, and would need to spend the night in some random LA hotel.

So we waited on the plane some more. Waited and waited. Eventually, the pilot announced that that ONE GUY was going to join the crew and help haul this bird to LA. It still seemed like it took forever for things to happen. Eventually, some three hours after originally scheduled, the plane pulled away from the gate. The plane was de-iced, taxied to the longest runway (which seemed to take forever) and we took to the air. I think we left the ground a total of four hours after we were supposed to.

Thankfully, there are power sockets available on this plane and I'm able to use my laptop to compose this blog entry without fear of draining my battery. Right now, as I'm writing this, I'm listening to so of my favourite tunes to help drain my rage. Today truly did suck. Hopefully, in our few hours in LA tomorrow we can figure out something that will salvage this expedition. Maybe we can go to In-N-Out Burger? Those are good burgers, Walter.