Our Last Entry

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, all good things must end, and this blog entry is the last one I will write for our Excellent Adventure . Last January, the end of our year of travels seemed like something in the distant future and never really entered our consciousness. And now it has happened. Our days of living out of a suitcase are over, at least for a while, and we have to readjust to a more “normal” life back in Calgary, which in many ways is just as, or even more, challenging than being on the road. Let me describe our journey home and then end with a few observations on the past year.

We left Rob and Lyn’s place before 7:00 a.m. on Sunday December 2nd and headed for the airport. It had been wonderful to see our friends again whom we had first met on a Caribbean cruise in 1992, especially with the added bonus of having been able to see their two sons again who are now successful young men with good careers. Hopefully we’ll be seeing them and other friends from Oz in Canada in the years to come. Anyway, Sydney traffic was light this Sunday morning and half an hour after leaving Ryde we entered the airport grounds and returned our rental vehicle.

Our flight was right on time, so after an excellent breakfast in the Air New Zealand lounge (Air Canada doesn’t have their own), we boarded our flight for Vancouver. Once again we had one of AC’s new Executive First cabins with their individual “pods” and lie-flat seats so we had a very comfortable flight. We touched down in Honolulu about 10 hours after take off and had to go through US customs before re-boarding the aircraft, a completely asinine and frustrating exercise in my opinion. But the Americans seem to delight in pissing off people coming to their country by putting everyone through the customs rigmarole, even when in transit. AC was starting a new non-stop Sydney to Vancouver route two weeks later that will eliminate the stop in Hawaii…too bad it hadn’t been sooner! Anyway, we got some sleep en route to Vancouver and touched down there two hours earlier than we had left Sydney, having “regained” the day we’d lost crossing the International Date Line in April.

Our first glimpse of Canada was a fitting one I suppose…grey skies and a thin blanket of white covering the normally green grass on the airport grounds. Yes there was snow to welcome us home, something rare in Vancouver at any time and certainly unusual for this early in the winter season. My first thoughts as we taxied to our gate were of our connecting flight to Calgary and whether there would be any problems…a prescient thought as it turned out!

As we waited for our noon flight it began to snow, a light dusting at first increasing in intensity as the morning wore on. We noted with some trepidation that the departures screen in the AC lounge showed a number of delayed and cancelled flights, but we were relieved to see our flight boarding right on schedule at 11:30. As our departure time of 12:00 arrived, the pilot announced that we were just waiting for de-icing before heading off to Calgary. And as it turned out, we waited a little longer than planned….4 hours to be exact. We sat there with occasional announcements saying we were still waiting (duh!!) and they didn’t have any idea when we’d leave. At least the crew turned on the entertainment system and we had time to watch a couple of movies which helped to pass the time. Finally at 3:30, the pilot announced that the airport had run out of de-icing fluid and that the flight was cancelled. This of course was a lie, as many flights did leave after ours, but I’ll give them marks for creativity at least!

We were told our bags would be unloaded and we could pick them up in the luggage area. Yeh right! After waiting another two hours with no sign of them, we gave up. We had to overnight in Vancouver. On the plane, the man sitting in front of me had lent me his cell phone to call the boys about our delay, and as we waited in line to change our flights to the next day, we struck up a conversation, which turned out to be very fortuitous. The hotel booking service for stranded passengers informed us that no rooms were available due to the many cancelled flights over the last 48 hours, but this fellow and his wife were frequent business travelers to Vancouver and stayed in a small boutique hotel downtown and he assured me he could get us a room there. So with the help of these fellow stranded passengers, we booked a room (by far the most expensive accommodation of our year away) and hopped a cab downtown. Our new-found friends were determined to wait for their luggage so hung around the airport a while longer, only to discover that all luggage on our flight was being routed directly to another plane which was going to Calgary that evening. (I guess they had miraculously found some more de-icing fluid!) Anyway, we had a very nice room at the Wedgwood Hotel and slept like logs till our wake up call at 7:30 the next morning.

The temperature had risen overnight and was now above freezing, and we could see that much of the snow had melted as we drove to the airport with our Good Samaritan couple. Being in Business Class we boarded first and as the last of the passengers streamed onto the packed aircraft we had yet another of our amazing “small world” experiences that have happened several time this past year. You can imagine our utter amazement when Sue’s best friend in Calgary, Diane, walked through the door and down the isle past us. It took a second for this to register and then all three of our mouths dropped open as we gawked at each other and tried to fathom this impossible coincidence. As it turned out, Diane had been in Penticton visiting her mother-in-law and was connecting in Vancouver for her flight to Calgary. As Diane blurted out…”What are the chances??” As the plane was about to leave Diane couldn’t stop more than a couple of seconds, but we caught up with here again the moment we deplaned in Calgary 90 minutes later.

Again this meeting was not only an amazing coincidence but turned out to be another very fortuitous encounter. We expected Ryan to be at the airport to pick us up, but after a call to our son (again having to borrow a cell phone – this time from Diane) we discovered that he couldn’t get his car started and he wouldn’t be coming. Fortune was shining on us as Diane’s husband Murray was waiting in their car outside the terminal and would give us a ride home. After a few minutes searching through the hundreds of suitcases which had been dumped in the baggage area we found our luggage and were on our way.

We found our house still standing when we got home and Ryan and Maddy, Rob’s lovely little terrier, there to greet us. Rob showed up later in the afternoon after he finished work and it was wonderful to be reunited with our family, albeit 24 hours later than planned. And therein lies one last “coincidence”. Readers of this blog may remember that on our very first flight on January 18th to Guatemala City, we were delayed by bad weather in Calgary and missed our connection in Houston, where we had to overnight. So, on both our first and last flights of this trip we experienced problems, though I must say that all our other flights and indeed all our travel has gone amazingly well otherwise.

So here we are back home. Things seem much the same as when we left in January, and a week later as I write this entry, we are pretty much back into a routine life in Calgary. The boys looked after the house pretty well though it needed a thorough cleaning (their view of clean and ours are pretty far apart!), and Sue has been busy getting the place shipshape. I unfortunately have been of little help as my hip has definitely taken a nosedive of late and I’m now not able to walk much. I saw my surgeon yesterday and am in the queue for a hip resurfacing or replacement, though I may have to wait up to 3 or 4 months before they can get me in. We are scrambling to get ready for Christmas as Ryan, Sue and I are heading to Saskatoon for a week while Rob is staying here and working. (He is certainly working hard at his job and finally appears to have found his occupational niche in life as an Acura salesman. And he is doing very well and realizing the fruits of his labour. His picture was in the paper a few weeks ago for getting the award for the top salesman this last quarter at his dealership!).

So that’s about the end of our story. We are back safe and sound and will likely not be doing any more travelling till I’m fully recovered from my hip surgery which could be 6 months or more. That doesn’t stop us from dreaming however, and realizing that we both enjoy travelling, I’m sure we’ll be flying off somewhere again as soon as we can.

So, how does one sum up such a marvelous experience as Sue and I have had without resorting to overused clichés and banal descriptions? I recall during our first week of this year away when we were staying at Puerto Barrios in Guatemala, we were chatting with a local with our rudimentary Spanish and he observed: “Ustedes estan teniendo una gran aventura” (You are having a great adventure) and he was right. Our “Excellent Adventure” as this blog has been called, has been both “great” and “excellent”. In our first entry, I commented on our excitement in setting of on this trip, but also some feelings of trepidation at venturing into the unknown. Although we had travelled for extended periods before, those adventures were many years ago when we were much younger and we weren’t certain how we would fare, especially in the unknown world of Central America and Peru. Australia was known territory and we realized that travelling there would be much more straightforward than our time in the Americas. But as it turned out, we really had nothing to be worried about as with a little forward planning and common sense the travelling was quite manageable.

This year has been a fantastic experience for both of us. We have seen many wondrous sights, had incredible experiences and met many wonderful people. The highlights are too many to mention though I might single out our time in Guatemala and Peru as perhaps the most intriguing and stimulating places we visited, and our three and a half months in Cairns as our most relaxing and enjoyable time. But nearly every day (with the possible exception of a couple of 45 degree days in northern Australia) was wonderful. We had thought about making a “top 10” list of our experiences, but that seems to be an impossible task. Suffice it to say that we have a wealth of memories and that our lives have been enriched as a result of this “gran aventura”. But this will be our last protracted journey like this. Sue and I both agree that a year is too long to be away and that our future travels will be in smaller segments of 2 or 3 months at the very most. Although we’ve made an admirable dint in Patricia Schultz’s list of “One Thousand Places To See Before You Die” we still have many new places to see and others to revisit. So who knows, there may be another travel blog in the future.

Let me end by saying “thank you”to a few people. To all those we have met and who have shared a part of our travels, it was a delight for us to have you share this experience with us. To Michael and Sue …thanks for our five-star experience in Costa Rica. To our friends Lyn and Rob, and Cheryl and Mike and their families, thanks for your hospitality and friendship in Australia. Thank you to all our family and friends who kept in touch…your emails and calls were much cherished and much appreciated. And to our boys Rob and Ryan, thanks for looking after things while we were away.

I hope you’ve enjoyed following along with Robb and Sue’s Excellent Adventure.