Canadian Journey

Today is the day we go home. We have a long journey ahead so we set off at 6:00am for the first leg, which is the drive to Victoria. This takes 5 hours on almost deserted roads, through the mountains and along the coastal highway. We stop for a quick breakfast on the road and we arrive in Victoria to hand back the hire car at about 11:00am.

This is where the fun starts. We check in at the floatplane terminal for our flight over to Vancouver, leave our bags and go off to have a break strolling round Victoria for a couple of hours. I take a few photographs. We watch the flight that we had originally booked on take off (we changed our reservation to a later flight so that we didn’t have to hang around Vancouver Internation Airport for too long) and then we slope off to have a lovely lunch in the open air overlooking the bay.

We check back in for our flight at the appointed time only to be told that the flight has been delayed due to fog. Fog? What fog? We can see a very thin haze on the horizon but it’s apparently enough to make take-off too dangerous. E. has a word with the captain who says this is very unusual and it will probably blow away in about 15 mins.

30 mins later they announce the flight has been cancelled. Other passengers get on to their mobile phones and start enquiring about ferry crossings and scheduled airline flights. We go to the desk to ask what we can do. They say that they can take us on a 4:00pm flight across to Vancouver Waterfront which is about 30 mins away from the International Airport. Our flight to Heathrow is due to depart at 5:25pm so, with luck, we can still get there in time. Apparently our bags have already gone on the earlier floatplane flight.

We spend a fraught couple of hours drinking free coffee and discussing a Plan B in case we miss the flight.

The fog clears and we get on the 4:00pm floatplane flight which lands in Vancouver on time.

We are reunited with our bags. We enquire what is the quickest way to get to the airport. We are told that the new Canada Line train will be the quickest. This is a new railway that had been opened only the week before to much fanfare in preparation for the Winter Olympics 2010. Oh goody, we think, we’ll be able to say we’ve been on the Canada Line.

A courtesy bus takes us the few blocks to the station. We descend to the ticket hall where we discover that the tickets are dispensed by unmanned machines which no-one seems to know how to work. Try as we might the machines will accept neither our credit cards nor our dollar bills. Fellow travellers warn us that the machines have been giving trouble since day one and that there are severe penalties for not having a ticket. Just as we are thinking of going back up to the street to get a taxi, a station employee passes by and helps us by coaxing one of our $5 bills into a machine to buy two tickets to the airport. We rush down to the trains and get on one straight away. 35 mins later we are at the airport. Strangely, there are no ticket barriers at either station and no-one has asked to see our Canada Line tickets.

We have thankfully already checked in to the Air Canada flight on-line so we already have our boarding passes but we have to go through the usual security checks. As before, my knee sets off all the metal detectors and once again I am frisked and searched.

When we finally emerge, there is a long, long walk to the gate. We have, by now, been travelling for almost 12 hours and I am exhausted. We arrive at the aircraft just before they close the doors.

The flight goes well, the food is still dire and E. takes the precaution of asking for two helpings of wine each. We spend the night watching our flight’s progress on the GPS screens in front of us.

We arrive at Heathrow early and when we come out we are met by our friendly, local taxi driver who takes us home. The journey has taken almost 24 hours.

Fanny and Charlie are overjoyed to see us.

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