Brent and Brenda have been living in Montréal for the past year as Brent has been serving as the Ambassador to ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization. I don't know anything about that, but I do know that Montréal is a pretty interesting place and that we wanted to visit them before they left (in July). When they were here at Christmas, we talked about going to see them and they graciously, even enthusiastically, encouraged us to do just that.
So we did.
Today we flew to Montréal. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 9:10 and I felt that if we left by 6:15 we would be in good time, knowing we had to park in long-term parking, go through security, and get to our gate. I was so pleased when we got in the car at 6:17 and were off. We were on 800 N in Orem, near the Murdoch Trail, when Kent said, "I left my toothbrush in the bathroom." His toothbrush was next to the bag of our toiletries, and I asked, "Did you leave all the toiletries?" Sure enough, all the toiletries.
He did a quick u-turn and we headed back for the left items. While we weren't really all that far from home, we had still gone close to ten minutes, so we added on an additional twenty minutes to the trip to the airport. Suddenly, we weren't quite as on time as I had hoped.
We did make good time, but I began to get slightly nervous when we had to park about as far away from the airport as possible in the long-term parking. We wove around the parking lot, and I tried not to freak out. Brandt asked a woman on the shuttle where she was going (Mexico) and volunteered that we were going to Canada. She said, "All the United and Air Canad flights leave from the B concourse. Don't wait around thinking you've got lots of time. It's a long way from where you go through security." Then I began to freak out just a bit more.
The line at security wasn't terrible. Brandt was talking to everyone, waving, and saying things that would get us all pulled aside by TSA, and Kent and I both kept telling him to stop talking. We didn't want to begin our trip getting arrest. Turns out, however, that it wasn't Brandt who was a problem at security, it was Isabella. As we passed through security, Isabella activated the alarm on the body scanner and had to be patted down. She had metal aglets on her sweatpants, and that seemed to be what set off the detector, and because they were by her midsection, she had to checked. The nice security lady was kind about patting her down, explaining all she was going to do, but I was thinking, 'Just pat her down already! We've got a flight to catch!' Isabella was thinking much the same thing; "Just do it! I don't have anything to hide. Quit talking to me."
We did make our flight, and everyone watched movies as we flew to Toronto. Brandt is flying to Ecuador alone next month, so we put him in charge of figuring out where we were going in between flights. He did fine. We had to pass through customs in Toronto as well, but it was all largely automated, so it was chop chop.
Brandt spent the whole trip we were not on the plane, filming "content" for his YouTube channel. Most of the content was pretty lame. He was filming as we were walking through a hallway as we headed towards customs. I asked if he thought anyone would be interested in watching him walk down a hallway (not me!), but he assured me he would cut and splice and it would be terrific. I think he'll have to cut A LOT!
Sadly, our second flight was delayed, but not until everyone had boarded. The captain came on to say that we were waiting for luggage to be transferred from other planes, and so we would be about forty minutes delayed. Then the captain apologized because they had to reset the air conditioning, so we sweltered for twenty or so minutes until it started working again. It was a short flight to Montréal, but upon arrival, the captain made another unpleasant announcement. There had been some lightning in the area so there was Code Red on the tarmac and all workers had to go inside. We were essentially at our gate, but we couldn't pull up to disembark until outside people could guide in the plane, so we sat for an additional thirty minutes waiting for the skies to clear enough that people could be back outside. Then we waited a long time for our luggage. It felt like we were delayed and delayed and delayed.
No comments:
Post a Comment