A Long Day! 🤬😅
As I begin writing this post we are still sitting on the tarmac at Pearson International just outside Toronto, now about 3 hours late. The proverbial ‘mechanical issue’ has reared its ugly head which is one way that Canadian airlines try to avoid paying out claims for cancelled or delayed flights. If we were in the EU when this happened then compensation would be almost certain.
The first leg from Vancouver went really well and we boarded a nice big plane transiting from Sydney, Australia. Lots of leg room and clearly a newly purchased airplane. It was super!
It’s now 9:40 pm and we might be lucky to get away by 10:30. I’m watching the Yellowstone spin-off series called Dutton Ranch so at least there are distractions.😅
A new update from the captain saying that at least another 30’.
We sent a message to the apartment we are staying in to let them know that we will be late, but now there is no way to communicate. My buddy David tells me that our car rental will still be waiting when we arrive. Good news!😮💨
We are being well looked after as the above photo suggests. The lady next to me hoped it might be tequila. No such luck.
And then a snack. These are not the images that I’d imagined sharing in this first post.
Now we have been asked to deplane. Another plane will pick us up in 2.5 hours. Love Air Canada!😂 Our next plane is scheduled to leave at 1 AM. They gave us some vouchers for food, but there are so many people and it’s so late that many of the little food kiosks are shutting down. or running out of food. The good news is, we fly home with Lufthansa. This is the airline that moved me last time into business class, and all I had to do was ask.
It’s now 12:30 AM and we theoretically depart in 30’. When we were tossed off the plane they gave us each $15 vouchers for dinner. However, for many of us the vouchers kept on coming! We ended up with $90 of which $40 was spent on dinner. We had designer burgers to go and they were actually pretty good.
After dinner I decided to use some of the remaining voucher$ to buy some munchies like mountain mix for hikes and stuff. I arrived at the Relay store to find everyone else was trying to spend all their voucher $. It was pretty chaotic as some tried to spend every last nickel. I managed to spend some of ours and left a long line behind me just as they were announcing our plane was boarding. I suspect not everyone was able to complete their spending spree.
We are now all back on board and instead of arriving at 11:30AM we will arrive at 5:30PM, we hope. We then have to go through customs and then pick up our car before driving 3 hours south to Kalamata on the south shore of the Peloponnese Peninsula. Probably driving in the dark. Perhaps we will just drive a ways out of Athens and find a small hotel somewhere. We will see.
The pilot has just informed us that there was a scratch on one of the engine intakes and they had to decide if it was safe enough to fly. Apparently it is, so we are. Bout to depart. Same air plane.
A very long day! Hopefully I can get some sleep on the plane. ✈️ 💤
Stay tuned!😬
Geoff.
