BACK HOME

I have arrived back home from my cousin’s wedding in Toronto. I had a lovely time in Canada’s most populous city and quite enjoyed all the wedding festivities. As always, it’s great to see family.

As many of you know, there are some exceptional weather conditions plaguing the east coast of North America right now and I was quite concerned that my flight this evening was going to be delayed considerably or even cancelled outright. I checked the status of my flight before leaving for the airport and everything seemed alright. When I arrived at Pearson International, I soon found out that many others were not so lucky. Most, if not all, flights to the northeastern parts of the US were cancelled. It was only until boarding time did a wrinkle appear in my travel plans. We were late in boarding because our gate was being used by another flight that was delayed in leaving. Once that plane left, our plane could then finally take its place at the gate. The flight next to us was in even more dire straits. Their plane was at the gate and ready to go but their crew was delayed getting into Toronto and the airline was scrambling to get a replacement crew onto the plane. Imagine a gate full of passengers and a plane readied and fully fueled but no crew to operate the plane.

Lucky for my flight, our crew was ready to go and everyone boarded quite quickly. We then unfortunately had to sit at the gate for another thirty minutes. Apparently Transport Canada requires some maintenance check for every aircraft before a flight. A plane cannot leave without it. With the craziness of the day, the maintenance crews were way behind schedule so we had to wait for some dudes to come around to our plane to do a walk-around inspection. We wound up leaving an hour after scheduled departure time which sucked. The rest of the flight passed without incident.

I suppose I should consider myself fortunate in that I was able to leave Toronto at all. In fact, our plane was scheduled to take another set of passengers back to Toronto this evening but that flight was cancelled. As we left the gate, I could see a line of those passengers waiting to talk to an airline employee about what they could do instead.

I am happy to be home and am in need of a good night of sleep!