We finally made it....

We got off to a great start yesterday ... the car arrived at 10:30 am and had us on the road by 10:45 as planned. We made awesome time to SeaTac (35 min) as traffic was "behaving itself". We were checked in about 20 minutes later as there were no long lines (we were told that the flight tends to run "a little late now"). We made it through security without any issues.. painless ... easy ... calm. It is now 12 noon.

But this my friends is where the story gets ugly. When we get to the north terminal and look up the flight, we notice the flight is now departing at 2:15pm (40 mins late). Well, thats what the checkin lady told us ... this is expected. At 1:30-ish the gate attendant made an announcement that started like this "...we are sorry to have to make this announcement...." OH CRAP ... here we go.

Apparently one of the lavatories on the aircraft was not fucntional... and the airline mechanics were working on it and we would know soon what our plan was going to be ... there were 3 options announced ...

1. Fix the lavatory and fly nonstop to Toronto (as planned, arriving late)
2. An unsuccessful fix which would have us fly to Vancouver BC where we would change planes and then fly nonstop to Toronto.
-or-
3. The flight would be canceled all together and everyone would be rebooked (ugghh).

At 2:30 they made an announcement to announce that nothing has changed.
At 3:00 they made another announcement to announce that STILL nothing has changed.
At 4:00 they made YET another announcement to announce that STILL nothing has changed.
At 4:30 they announced that we were flying to Vancouver. After taking much time in preparing the aircraft for the 45 minuted flight we took off around 5:30-ish. We were to clear customs in Vancouver then board another airplane that had been arranged to rescue us (yay).

We arrived in Vancouver and cleared customs ("... where are you going?", "Toronto", "from here?", "our plane was broke", "oh... do you have anything to declare?....") only to not really know where our luggage was going to show up ("..ladies and gentlemen from Seattle to Toronto .. your luggage will come up on carosel #20 ... but keep and eye on #21, just in case...").

All this to just to get in another line to re-checkin and get reassigned on the new flight. OK all this was finally done ... let's get to Toronto! Our (new) flight finally took off around 7:30 pm pacific time (an hour and a half after we were suppose to arrive at our destination). If you add the flight time that get us into Toronto around 3am (eastern).

Upon arrival the deplaning was the most uncivil deplaning I have ever seen in my entire life! Mrs H was actually shoved out of the way by some *richard cranium* "trying to squeeze by her" WTF?????

Meanwhile Mrs. H's father had been to the airport to pick us and been back again (2 hr drive each way). He was told that we would be arriving at 6:30am ...good thing we called!

When this was all said and done we arrived at the folks at 5am ... and I got 5 some hours of sleep... I will be sleeping well tonight!

Posted by Timothy at December 18, 2004 5:38 PM