SeaTac was a zoo, and very unorganized. There was also a HUGE group of people traveling to Germany I think, and they were taking forever to process. Thankfully it wasn’t too long before we got our boarding passes (for both legs of the flight) and were off to the gate to wait. They didn’t charge us for the extra bag this time since it was technically a United Airlines check in (for an Air Canada Jazz flight?) and United lets you have 2 bags.
The plane we flew on was the smallest I have been on, so small that they even wanted people to put their carry on in with the checked luggage. I managed to keep ours since we had the laptop and the pharmacy we typically carry. It was a quick 20 minute flight from Seattle to Vancouver and then the fun starts.
My friend Vanessa, who is a flight attendant for Skyservice, suggested we have at least 3 hours for a connection in Vancouver, and now I know why! You walk forever from the plane (ours was disembarked on the tarmac) then are herded like cattle through a HUGE room for customs, then collect your baggage. At this point I started to panic … we couldn’t find one of the bags. Why did we get black luggage again?? Everyone had black luggage. Since we were on a small flight we figured it would be easy. Nope! They put our luggage on a carousel that included several overseas flights. What a mess. Finally found it before I had a full on melt down and proceeded to recheck it. No charge again, I think they just weren’t paying attention frankly!
We asked for the gate number and were directed to a particular one but told to recheck the monitors. Thankfully we did because she had sent us to the wrong gate.
They had changed the aircraft we were to be on from a 767 to an Airbus 320 which changed the seating configuration and now we had a seat in-between us. We were grateful the flight was taking standby people and the seat between us wasn’t sold, so I moved over for a standby passenger to have the aisle, which was fine with me.
We were happy to have the individual entertainment units again on this flight, although it wasn’t the same selection, and had quite a lot less in fact. I watched “What Happens in Vegas” and had to keep from laughing out loud a few times. I wanted to see Indiana Jones or The Happening, but they wouldn’t function.
The trip back was rough, lots of turbulence thanks to the remnants of Ike. We didn’t actually see the ground until the point where we touched down in Toronto. And it was a VERY rough landing.
Since we cleared customs in Vancouver, we only needed to collect our luggage and find Mom and Aunt Deb. This was not a problem. They had arrived at 9pm (we weren’t scheduled to arrive until 11:15 and ended up being late) and were waiting outside baggage claim. When they saw us, they snuck in to help us get the bags.
Dropped Aunt Deb off at her new apartment and headed to mom’s to see our babies. Frankly I think the cats would have been happier to stay there. Little Bits because she hates the car and Tigger because he received so much attention and so many treats all week.
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