For a While!

So it’s nearly 9pm and I’m safe and sound in good ‘ol PEI. It wasn’t an easy trek to get here, but we got here eventually. Let me explain.

We drove super early to Kelowna yesterday morning to catch the 11am flight out of there. We were all tired for the drive since we spent the night before consuming lots of delicious food and playing games with the family. But we hauled our butts out of bed and got on the road as soon as possible. The main strange thing that happened during that drive was the number of dead cats on the road. It’s quite rare to see cats killed by cars, and we saw 2 kitty road-kills in less than 5 minutes. Strange? My first comment was, “is this a bad omen to see this many dead cats?” No one answered. There were actually a lot of dead animals on the drive. And I mean A LOT! I’ve honestly never seen as many as I did this time. Cursed highway?

Our flight out of Kelowna was late, but this was no big deal since we had a small layover in Calgary. Also the flight in Calgary was running quite late as well so we literally walked off of one plane and hopped onto another to head to Toronto. While waiting to take off, we also learned that two passengers failed to show up for their flight so they had to find and remove their luggage from the cargo hold…this meant a longer wait for takeoff. The flight was quite uneventful (which is always good) and I watched a semi-strange but enjoyable movie called “The Paper Man”. It stars Jeff Daniels who plays an unsuccessful writer and has only one friend; an imaginary friend named Captain Excellent played by Ryan Reynolds. If for only one reason to watch this movie, do it for the fact that Ryan wears spandex the entire film. I wasn’t complaining.

So we arrived at the Toronto Airport 40 minutes late for our flight to Charlottetown. Needless to say, they left without even looking back for us. So we went to customer service where they informed us that we were booked on a flight to Halifax in a few hours which would land around 2am and then catch an 8am flight to Charlottetown. Ugh. Ok. Fine. About an hour into waiting for our next flight, I had an idea! We went back to customer service and asked if they would put us up in a hotel for the night in Toronto and get us on an early flight to Charlottetown. The very helpful and very blond lady at the desk asked us to sit down and wait while she called her manager. An hoooooouuuuuur later another lady came over and told us that we had a room at the Delta and a flight to Charlottetown at 8:30am. Sweet! By this time is was 11pm and we still had to wait for our luggage to get brought to us. We went down to the baggage claim and waited for an hour and a half for our baggage to show up. Chris’s guitar didn’t show up though, so we went to another customer service desk and asked what the deal was. The dude there assured us the guitar was somewhere in the baggage area but was about an hour away from getting out to us (since it was a unusual shaped luggage it had to go to a different area for processing). Ok. Fine. We’d get it tomorrow.
We waited another half hour for the shuttle to the hotel. By the time we got to bed last night, it was 2am and we had to get up in 3.5 hours to get back on the shuttle to make sure we got back to the airport for our flight. The one thing I hate about big cities is that it takes so long to get from point A to point B. It took 6 hours to get from the customer service desk (awaiting approval for flight change) to bed. So many lines to wait in, so many people to bypass, just so much much much. I just really wanted sleep. Mmmmm. Sleep.

The next morning went smoothly. The flight from Toronto to Charlottetown was smooth and simple and we landed safely just before noon. I was really sad to watch the mountains fade away during take off from BC, but now that I am back here in PEI…I feel good. Sam and I went out for drinks and dinner and it was nice to sit back, gossip and chat, and just enjoy the evening. I’m exhausted and anxious to get all of my errands done tomorrow, but being back in this house and back in this familiar city is strangely comforting. BC is my heart and I love it…but if need be, I can survive here for a while. FOR A WHILE!