We left the -24 Celcius land that is called Saskatchewan and headed to the balmy land of +6 Celcius called Vancouver Island. By carefully editing Vancouver Island photos, I can lead you to believe that all their snow has melted from the record-breaking snows they had a few weeks ago.
Believing in full disclosure though (unlike the leader of a country to the south of us), I will admit there is still snow, not only in the trees, but in other areas as well.
Just the same, we are happy that we went from this ....
... to this
Those of you who receive my Christmas letter, will remember me singing the praises of Air Canada.
We were supposed to be here for Christmas but then I was called for my hip replacement. Air
Canada let us know we had full credit for our flights.
Happily we went to rebook. Unhappily we were told, “surely we forgot to mention the $300 rebooking fee.” Well, yah, you did forget. “Oops, sorry. Yes, you must pay us an extra $300 if you
want to use your voucher.” Grrrr. $300 is like the cost of a flight.
What could we do? We wanted to see this child.
Plus, I wanted to play Scrabble with her at breakfast...
and at supper.
The added adventure to our travels here was that we
had only 35 minutes to change planes in Vancouver. We were told that would be adequate time. Our flight out of Regina was delayed about half an hour, but the Air Canada agent assured us there were strong tailwinds and we would be okay. We got to Vancouver with next to no time before
our Vancouve to Nanaimo flight.
We asked where our gate was and ran down two moving walkways, through a door, down a ramp, past three gates, and got to the right gate. That’s when I learned a person with a hip replacement can sprint.
The agent told us that we made the flight by one minute. Two disgruntled fellows looked at us. Had we not shown, they would have got on as standby-by. The pilot was waiting at the steps to the plane. He followed us onto the plane, the doors shut, and we were off.
The end of that story is that our flight was supposed to arrive in Nanaimo at 3:01 and it arrived in Nanaimo at 3:01.
