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This day almost reversed the previous eleven days of relaxing. A word to the wise: if you ever do something like this, fly home from Seattle. Apparently, those who did got to take a bus from the Vancouver pier straight to Seattle without having to deal with customs at all. But we were flying out of Vancouver.
We got off the ship at about 8:00 AM. We had to find our bags and clear customs into Canada. Then we boarded a bus to the airport. It took a while for the bus to fill up, and then we took the scenic tour through Vancouver to the airport, where we had to wait for a space to open up for the bus. They pulled up at the international terminal for flights to the U.S. and unloaded all of the baggage. The only problem is that we weren't taking a flight to the U.S. -- our first leg was to Toronto. We weren't the only ones, so they had to load all of the remaining baggage back into the bus and drive to the Air Canada gate.
Once again we had to find our bags, and then we went into the terminal. It was now 9:45 and we had an 11:00 flight. I guess Saturday isn't a popular day to fly, because there wasn't too much Air Canada staff there, and the line was so long it was clear we had no hope of making our flight. We tried one of the self-service kiosks even though we had paper tickets, but it didn't work, so we went to a self-service help line which was short but didn't move. We finally checked our luggage and got our boarding passes, made it through security and got to the gate just as the flight started boarding. Our seat assignments were screwed up, and in fact there seemed to be mass confusion about seat assignments in general.
We landed in Toronto and, according to our boarding passes for the flight to Baltimore, we had to go to gate S in terminal 2. We followed the signs to terminal 2 and ended up in a line for a shuttle bus. We took the bus to terminal 2 which seemed to be devoted to flights into the U.S., and walked forever through corridor after corridor, up escalators and down more corridors. Finally we ended up at ..... a baggage claim area. Apparently, we had to clear customs back into the U.S. before boarding our flight, and we had to have our bags with us to do that. So we searched for our bags for the third time today, filled out a customs card, followed more corridors through more twists and turns, and ended up at a long line.
Now it was Saturday evening, and I guess that's not a popular time to fly from Canada to the U.S. because there weren't very many people manning the customs area. It was close to 7:00 and we had an 8:00 flight, so once again I figured we were going to miss the flight. I checked with one of the customs folks and found out our flight was now at 8:30 so there was some hope. After what seemed like forever we got through customs. Then we had to have all of our baggage X-rayed, and of course they wanted to search one of my bags. We got our baggage checked, made it through security, and then started power walking to gate S, which was pretty far away.
We got to gate S about ten minutes before boarding time only to find that the gate as well as the entire section of the airport was completely deserted. Something was obviously wrong so I found an electronic flight board and discovered that our flight was not at gate S but at gate E. Of course, gate E was not on our way back to the beginning. We had to retrace our steps and go off in a different direction. We followed the signs down the hall, down some stairs, around a corner and ended up ...
at another shuttle bus. The driver sat there reading a paper as boarding time rapidly approached. We finally drove across the tarmac to a relatively small terminal with a bunch of small planes outside. We made our flight -- a 50 or 60 passenger plane with a big propellor on each wing. It was noisy and vibrated a bit, but really wasn't a bad flight. We got to Baltimore, got our bags and went outside to find the van that was supposed to pick us up. It wasn't there and nobody answered when I called their number, so we took a cab home. It was now 11:00 PM but felt like 7:00 to us and we hadn't eaten dinner. It's a good thing Wendys' pick-up window is open late.
THE END