Trip from hell?

Trip from hell? I don’t know, you judge yourself:

I was travelling from Vancouver to Raleigh, NC with a transfer flight in Toronto yesterday. Arrived in Vancouver International Airport and BANG, people were everywhere. I’m doing self check-in no problems right?

WRONG!

Out of a handful of machines 2 of them were broke. The Air Canada ppl assured us that the machines worked but they didn’t at.

So I waited in line for this functional machine. Half way through the check-in process the machine asked for my passport (standard procedure for travelling to US), so I stuck my passport into the scanner.

RUN TIME ERROR
SYSTEM CRASH

Mmmm Windows terminals aren’t all that reliable. Tell me something I don’t know. So I moved into another line and tried to check in with another self check-in machine.

CANNOT CHECK IN PLEASE SEE A REPRESENTATIVE

I looked at the screen in horror, the “regular” check-in line up was at least 30 mins, my flight was leaving in about 1.5 hr. Looked like more line for me.

40 mins of line faff later I finally got everything sorted out. Hmmm the Olympics is coming to Vancouver in Feb, for some odd reason I don’t think YVR is quite ready just yet…

Anyway many minutes later boarded my flight. I thought I could just sit back and relax.

WRONG!

We hit turbulence pretty much the entire way, roller coaster ride. I’m not just talking regular turbulence but REALLY bumpy ones. The captain actually lowered the flight altidue a few times trying to achieve a smoother ride. At one point I actually felt pretty scared…

Luckily the airplane didn’t crash and we landed at Toronto International Airport. Good about 2 hours of wait time, hop on a 1 hour flight, and I’ll be in Raleigh.

As soon as I arrived at the terminal we were hit by a thunder storm. It was one of the most intense thunder storms I’ve seen in my life (the one we had in Vancouver few weeks ago had nothing on this one). At few instances the airport lights actually flickered!

“Well I’m glad I’m not in the air during a thunder storm…”

The 9:10 PM flight was soon delayed to 10 PM.

Then it got delayed to 11:45 PM. By that time I was a bit freaked out, the car rental company closes at 12:30 AM. There was no way I’d arrive in time to get my car. So I got on the internet to get the contact info and called the rental car company. Luckily they said they’d wait for the last flight to come in before they close.

Everything’s good right?

WRONG!

About 10:30 PM some ppl noticed that the boarding gate was changed to the other side of the terminal, so everyone began to move. As soon as we got to the “new” boarding gate we noticed that our flight was listed as CANCELED and was then soon removed from the board.

Great, flight’s canceled now what?

Turned out they canceled pretty much all the Air Canada flights due to the bad weather. After learning what’s going on I was quick to dash across the airport to get to the line to rebook my flight. (It was my first canceled flight but I knew that being slow to get to the lineup wasn’t a good idea)

I was somewhat lucky, the line was not THAT long when I got there.

2 hours of waiting later I found out all direct flights to Raleigh on Monday were full, the earliest one was Tuesday afternoon. Considering I’m going down for a limited time I couldn’t afford wasting 2 days sitting in Toronto, so I began to look for other options.

2 other passengers going to Raleigh were in the same boat. We soon decided to take a flight to Richmond at 8:40 AM on Monday and somehow figure out our way to Raleigh once we get to Richmond.

So at 1:30 AM in the morning I got to the hotel room but widely awake. Taxi’s picking me up at 6 AM. I managed to get maybe 2 hours of sleep…

Got to the airport this morning and there was a huge lineup already.

GREAT.

Got to the security check-in only to find out I was “screened” because apparently changing my flight was suspicious and I just look like a terrorist.

So I got the special security search.

Now I’m sitting at the terminal waiting to board by flight to Richmond. Just have to get there and figure out how to get to Raleigh.

Trip from hell to be continued?