On Sunday evening I went to pickup my Mom from the airport. She had been in Montreal for several weeks to visit her sister and help take care of her mother, who is experiencing some health issues. Of course, these are my aunt and my grandmother to me.
My Mom’s flight was supposed to arrive just after 11pm, which is quite late in the evening for a flight. The flight was delayed, however, which is a common occurrence these days. The delay wound up being an hour and a half long, which apparently due to a mechanical problem. That’s a long delay and my poor Mom had to endure that by herself.
I left my place around 11:45pm, to give myself time to drive to the airport, get a cart ready, and be present to greet my Mom. I have to say, if you have to drive to the airport, doing it near midnight on a Sunday is a good time to do it. Traffic was very light and I got there in almost record time.
My Mom’s flight touched down around 12:30am. It took several more minutes for the plane to get to the gate, several more for the plane to deboard, and even more for her to walk from the gate to the luggage carousel where I was waiting for her. I got her seated while I got her luggage because she was exhausted after almost eight hours of travel, if you include the flight, the delay, and the drive to the airport on the Montreal side. By the time we got her luggage, loaded it up in my car, and started driving to my parents’ place, it was after 1am.
Even with no traffic, it still took about 40 minutes or so to drive from the airport to my parents’ home. I helped unloaded my Mom’s luggage and brought it inside. By then it was almost 2am. I didn’t want to leave right away because I hadn’t seen my Mom in several weeks and it’d been about a week since I last saw my Dad. I had a quick chat with them and my Mom had brought me some food from Montreal. I got some bagels and some Montreal smoked meat, which was quite kind of her. My aunt also gave me, via my Mom, some vegetables from her garden.
By the time I finally left my parents’ place it was after 2am, which was quite late for me. It took me about 18 minutes to get home, which is incredibly fast because even on a weekend, it takes me about 30 minutes to do the same trip.
After cleaning up and getting ready for bed, I didn’t roll into my bed until 3am. I had a 9am meeting the next day, so it was gonna be an early day for me. Now I’ve had productive work days on six hours of sleep before so I didn’t think it was gonna be that bad. When I woke up at 8:50am the next morning, I was feeling rough. I’m not sure if it was all the driving I did the night before but I woke up feeling exhausted.
I somehow managed to get through the work day fine. I took a nap around 6pm for around thirty minutes. Now usually if I take one nap after work, I’m good for the rest of the evening but around 9pm, I feel asleep on the couch again. I must have been extra tired that day.
Despite the fatigue, I feel like if you have to pickup someone from the airport, a Sunday evening is a pretty good time. There’s almost no traffic, parking is easy, and the terminal is nearly empty.