Kate’s Winter Vacation

The vacation started off with a foreboding sense of doom, as weather reports for the weekend of the 16th called for snow, snow and more snow in Ontario. I doggedly went ahead with my plan to leave Peterborough on the evening of the 15th and get a bus to Toronto to stay overnight in a hotel before my morning flight on the 16th, just assuming that a little bit of snow would only slow down the process a little bit. Ha. Ha. Ha. It took twice the amount of time it ought to have to get to Toronto in the first place (over 3 hrs instead of the usual 1h30) and then I had to get to the hotel out in god-knows-where near the airport from the downtown bus terminal. Needless to say I got cash out of the ATM and flagged a taxi, because the airport shuttles from downtown were nowhere to be found. Then the taxi took me to Four Points Sheraton Toronto Airport. And guess what? THERE ARE TWO OF THEM. And I went to the wrong one. So I had to get MORE money from the ATM (don’t ask me how much I spent on taxis, PLEASE) and get another taxi to take me to the OTHER one, the Toronto Airport WEST version of same hotel. GAH. I had a nice club sandwich in the restaurant JUST before it closed and then went upstairs to my room and watched Sydney White on the TV. Because I could.

In the morning I woke up godawfully early to get my room service breakfast before I had to get the shuttle at 7:20am. No breakfast appeared, despite my having ordered it the night before to arrive at my room before 7am. Call down to the room service people. Apparently on Sunday mornings they don’t serve breakfast before 7:30. NICE TO KNOW, COULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT BEFORE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. So I went down to the lobby and sulked while waiting for my shuttle to the airport (which was also late) and resigned myself to eating in the airport before my flight at 10:15. No problems getting through security etcetera at the airport, managed to get myself a very nice location for my seat on the plane and everything, was feeling pretty proud of myself for getting this far. Got a Timmy’s breakfast and walked up and down the concourse aimlessly while waiting for my plane to board. And there we went, we boarded on time and everything. Then sat on the plane for a while. Then we were told that the pilot wasn’t there and they didn’t know where he was. Uhm. Please stand by for further information. Okay, pilot isn’t GOING to show up, get off the plane please you’re delayed until 3pm. GROAN. Oh crap am I going to miss my connecting flight in Hong Kong? No I’m not, I had a long stopover in Hong Kong anyway it’s okay. And Air Canada is giving us lunch vouchers. Okay. I can cope.

About an hour later I discover that my plane is delayed some MORE until about 6pm. Now I AM going to miss my connecting flight, so I go up to talk to the people at the desk and they tell me there’s nothing they can do from there, I’ll be taken care of at the other end. Great. After eating both a lunch and a dinner (now it’s around 5:30 and I’m expecting to board any minute, because really, other flights have been boarding why the heck can’t we board, we’ve been sitting here since 8am!!!) guess what? Flight gets delayed AGAIN. Now we’re not leaving until about 7:45pm. WHATEVER, I was missing my connection ANYWAY I just want to GO SOMEWHERE other than this STUPID TERMINAL. Riotous applause breaks out in our section of the terminal (did I mention that they switched our gate departure more times than they delayed us?) as the pilot and crew boards the plane ahead of us. NOW we’re getting somewhere.

I don’t think I’ll go into any great detail about the flight itself. I can never sleep on planes well so I watched Hairspray, Grease, No Reservations and Stardust instead. And read a bit. And “slept.” And ate what they served me. I don’t remember what it was. It wasn’t good, that’s for sure.

In Hong Kong, they hustled us off (labeling us with Air Canada stickers as they did so) to a counter elsewhere in the terminal (I think it was about… 1 or 2am local time?) to tell us that there was no way we were going to Manila (or anywhere else where people were connecting to) any time soon, we’d be put up in a hotel at the airport and we should be back in the terminal by 6:30am (yeah that’s right, four hours later…) to stand by, as the first flight would be leaving at around 8am for Manila. Lovely.

Instead of trying to get a lot of sleep I decided to have a shower to feel more human and go find an internet connection to inform my poor frantic Mummy that I was still alive and coping. I discovered upon arrival in Manila that Mum had gone into crazy Momma Bear mode over my traveling issues and was making a pest of herself at every airline counter she could think of calling. Also I found out that there was a 3:20am flight to Manila that still had seats on it. OY! OY!!! Why weren’t we told about this?! Anyway, I found out about it around 3am while emailing in a very nice business office in the hotel that they kindly let me use for free. So no dice. Then I got a little bit of sleep in my room (maybe two hours) and then went over to the terminal again to stand by assertively.

Over the course of this messiness I made a conversation buddy of a guy who was traveling to visit his family in Manila (he lives in Toronto with his wife and kids, who were not joining him on the trip, but his parents live in Manila). He was also a fan of asserting himself for standing by, so when the Hong Kong airport official said “okay, I take you, and you…[two women who apparently had dibs for some reason] and three others” he and I and another guy who he had been chatting with just decided that those three others were going to be US and just walked away with the guy while the other crowd of people were still waving their arms in the air and looking confused. Muahahahaha. So I got myself on the first plane out of Hong Kong to Manila that morning. Congratulations to me.

Upon arriving in Manila I even managed to find that my luggage had checked through properly… but no Mummy to meet me. So uhm… now what? No Philippines money, no phone… so I met a nice guy who was also on stand by with me the whole time and he let me text Mum from his phone, but that didn’t work out so well because before Mum replied he went away with his ride. Oops. Then my conversation buddy loaned me 7 pesos to use the phone to call Mum’s cellphone. Okay, busy signal… busy signal… call Daddy… busy signal… go try a different pay phone… get through to Mum but she can’t hear me… try again same deal… call Dad same deal… ARGH. Wander down to the passenger pickup area and find another payphone and AHA SUCCESS get through to Mum and she can actually hear me this time. So we arrange a meeting spot and she eventually finds me when she and the driver get to the airport. Whew. And only 12 hours later arrival than originally intended.