WE WAIT IN THE GATE AREA FOR THEE

I'm back from Canada! No, that wasn't me getting arrested in Toronto, although there are some Air Canada employees I'd like to (deleted due to NSA reasons...Hi, NSA!). We flew from Philadelphia International Airport (motto: Sorry, That's Out of Order) first to Toronto's Lester B. Pearson International Airport for our scheduled (that's pronounced SHED-U-ELED) flight to Montreal. That flight had already left because we had sat on the tarmac for two hours in Philly due to thunderstorms. Air Canada re-routed us to a direct flight to St. John's leaving at 10:55 PM, which was four hours away. We exchanged our greenbacks for garish portraits of Queen Elizabeth, and sat in the gate for three hours, until, ominously, the gate sign without warning switched from "St. John's 22:55" to "Montreal 00:30". I checked the departures board, and our flight showed "CANCELLED". Oh, joy. We checked at the Air Canada information desk, and they said that the St. John's airport was fogged in, and that we could catch the next flight in the morning at 7:30 AM. "Will you get us a hotel?" we ingenuously asked. "Oh, no, of course not!" they replied. "Air Canada does not reimburse for weather cancellations." So, basically, you buys your tickets, you takes your chances. Luckily, Canada is known for its excellent weather. I think it was at this point that I first referred to Newfoundland as "Mordor".

We high-tailed it to the hotel shuttle phone bank area and booked a room at the Airport Courtyard. Nice room, but at C$99, it was about C$99 more than I wanted to spend. Mere minutes later, we woke up, showered, and rushed back to the airport. Finally, we were on our way to Newfoundland! All that for...that. We landed in St. John's, got our rental car, picked up some groceries, and drove out to Holyrood, a small town on Conception Bay, where our lodging was located. We took the peculiarly-named Trans Canada Highway, which neither goes across all of Canada (Newfoundland is an island, of course) nor is it a highway, unless you call two parallel blank slabs of asphalt a highway. At Holyrood, we took our keys from a white-haired Newfie fresh from Central Casting named Pat. I understood about a fifth of what he said, which was uttered in a thick Irish/Newfie brogue. After engaging in several minutes of excruciating chat with Pat (he's a very, very nice man, but his gift for Blarney is Brobdignagian), we put our stuff away and took a nap. We then drove back to St. John's to eat dinner, and then to greet my brother, his wife, his daughter, and her baby at the airport. After their trip, my brother decided that Air Canada is "almost like a real airline." Apparently, their flight to St. John's from Halifax had to abort its takeoff when a nuisance light went off in the cockpit during the run-up. They had to return to the gate, de-plane, and then board another plane (which was waiting to fly a bunch of people to Montreal) before they could finally take off.

At 11:30 PM that night, my brother and I drove back to St. John's from Holyrood to pick up the remainder of our party, which consisted of my mother, two of my sisters, my nephew, my niece, and my niece’s four-year-old boy. It's too difficult to write about, let alone experience. They took something called CanJet all the way from Florida, and had no issues. We looked all over St. John's, seemingly, for someplace to eat after midnight, and found a lonely Subway still open. My 17-year-old nephew mentioned to the teenaged girls assembling our sandwiches that he was from Orlando, which elicited cries of "Oh, I'm so jealous!" I'll bet. If you go, ladies, stay away from Air Canada is all I'm saying.

The rest of the week proceeded with few problems, aside from the freakishly cold and miserable Newfoundland June weather. We must have run the TCH enough times to be made honorary members of Transport Canada. There just isn’t much to do in Holyrood, after all. My mom got to see her old house, and the rock on the hill above the house that her brother always told her would fall on her while she slept. We went to the same grocery store three times, because we kept running out of everything. We visited Signal Hill, which offers a breathtaking view of St. John’s harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. We walked the streets of Downtown St. John’s, where teenagers and 20-something slackers dress exactly as they do everywhere else. We saw the Johnson Geo Centre, an underground science museum. We saw The Rooms, a decidedly above-ground art museum, again with excellent harbor views. Pat came to visit. And talk. And talk. And talk. We climbed up to see the lighted cross overlooking Holyrood and Conception Bay. We watched the Canadian perspective on the Zarqawi bombing. We watched bad television for hours every morning waiting for my niece and nephew to finally wake up and grace us with their presence. My brother, sisters, and I made fun of my mother’s far-right-of-Rush Limbaugh politics. We ate cod, moose stew, scrunchions (whatever they are), pizza, and the early birthday cake we had bought for my mom’s 80th. It was a very good week, indeed.

The return trip was uneventful. Isn’t it always that way? I wish I could get stuck, for once, where I was vacationing. “Oh, sorry, I won’t be in to work tomorrow. The flight was cancelled.” Never happens.

BLOG? WHAT BLOG?

Hey, everybody (and by everybody, I mean all of you with a Karen Grassle fetish), I'm still alive! If you want to hear about my trip to St. John's, Newfoundland, leave a comment. Or don't. I'm going to post it anyway, so I don't really care.

And turnarounds are still hell, and now there are only three and a half years until the next one. Speaking of countdowns, I think we're at A.B.B - 885. I also want to say, I called the Al Gore resurgence. Not that the Al Gore resurgence means anything, of course, but still.