Leaving home we felt confident about the timing of flights and the scheduled events for the trip. I worried a little about getting to Toronto in time to make the 8:30 reservations we had at Susur Lee’s restaurant, if you don’t eat you die, right? Susur Lee we discovered watching Top Chef and since he was from Toronto and we were going to Toronto and his restaurant was in Toronto, and the kids live in Toronto, it just seemed like a no-brainer. Susan and Olie picked us up about 6pm and swiftly hustled us off to Ula and Paul’s new apartment in the art’s district of Toronto (within walking distance to Lee’s restaurant). Shortly after leaving the airport Olie turns to me and says he heard on the radio that Air Canada is going to go on strike Monday night at midnight. We had just arrived on the only flight portion of our trip that was not run by Air Canada, yipes.
So we waited until 12:00am Tuesday to find out that 3800 employees had walked off their jobs leaving a bunch of anxious travelers wondering. We planned for the worse and got it, arriving for our 8:45am Tuesday morning flight to Prince Edward Island at 5:20am we very smoothly moved through check in and security. The administrative staff on duty was very attentive, helpful and at that time of the morning the strike was only 5hrs old with no impact. Feeling like we dodged a bullet, breakfast was the logical thing to do. 6:15am was the next timing problem to deal with, no food until 6:15, no problem, hell considering the situation another 20 minutes presented no worries. We were the first breakfast customers and our waitress (Lizzie Borden) made sure we knew how inconvenient it was to be the first customers in her unbelievably hard day of serving food. We avoided her hatchet, ate and relaxed at our gate for about an hour and a half checking e-mail, getting a little work done and killing time. I looked over my shoulder at the gate we were scheduled to leave by and noticed our flight was not up, rather a 10am flight to Quebec. Worried again I walked up to the lady at the gate and asked her if our flight was indeed still scheduled for this gate, with a big smile showing almost perfect teeth she told me yes and not to worry. Fine, I went back to my seat and watched things, thinking maybe that great smile was wrong we gathered our bags and went back to the gate and asked another happy attendant to confirm our gate assignment, eureka – changed to a gate very far away with little time until boarding closed, the confusion is becoming viral. We run/walk to the new gate to find it to be out of service and populated by nervous travelers orbiting like exited electrons waiting to be shed. We allow ourselves to be shed to the next gate to talk to anyone in uniform, it was confirmed that we would be leaving though the out of service gate. With our confidence soaring we shuffled back to our out of service gate to find two women trying to handle the problem of no public address mechanism, no check in computers, and no help. Trying to talk loud without yelling alpha babe made a power decision, “were going to start the boarding process now and were going to do it manually.” Hallelujah I thought, do it with crayons, just get us on the plane and out of here!
Hot diggety dam, were on the plane, what could go wrong now! Of course boarding took longer than usual, and it started late, but we are all here, accounted for, seatbelts buckled, tray tables in there upright positions, it’s time to fly! This is the captain speaking – “Due to the many delayed flights this morning we do not have a tug to push us away from the gate, so it will be just a few minutes and we will be on our way.” What! What! After considering mustering a gang of large males on board to push our plane away (we were on a very small jet with 26 passengers, it was I believe do-able) we were finally pushed away 1 hour later and actually arrived in P.E.I. So we are here and are not sure how we will get back! For that stay tuned.
