the luggage saga continued

The four of us went and lined up to report missing luggage. One girl had a family member lapping the airport in their car waiting for her, and they phoned about every 5 minutes to see if anything had happened yet. I let her go ahead of me. So I reported the bags missing and cabbed in to Meredith's place.

 She was home and looking terrific after her three weeks in Richmond/Vancouver with Nic. I called the airport to check if they had found the bags yet. Their computers were now down, so the gentleman said he would call me back in 15 minutes. He didn't. Meredith wanted to go scout out the school where she was to be starting student teaching in the morning, so we did, so she could get an idea of how long it would take to get there, and what it looked like. As we were walking down the street, I was phoned back and had to give all my information again. It is so much fun to stand on a busy street and bellow my personal info into a cell phone and have the guy ask you to repeat yourself, somebody in Toronto might have missed something. Finally,  he ran out of questions, just before I lost my temper, and we went on our way hoping they really would find my bags. That bottle of Scotch that Alexander sent for Meredith was starting to sound really good.

We found the school, and it is beautiful. Meredith is starting a session of student teaching at a swanky private girls school that specializes in the IB program. We confirmed with a caretaker which building was for the junior school and then headed off to the ROM gift shop. It is cold in Toronto, with a damp chill, but we kept walking and were fine. On the way home we stopped at a Loblaw's and got some groceries. Dinner and a pleasant evening, and I checked the computer. Air Canada was still looking for my bags.

Monday morning, 7 am, checked the computer listing again and my bags have been located and sent out for delivery. Hurray thought I, clean underwear! I was wrong it is now 15:47, or 3:37 pm, and still no bags. No ROM for me today. So this a blog about how I spent my visit to Toronto so far, waiting for my luggage, and thinking fondly of the clean underwear that it contains, and the Scotch........

Air Canada Has My Luggage, and they won't give it back

   Yesterday I left Fredericton, NB for Toronto. Not too complicated, one would think. The plane was delayed leaving. We were supposed to take off at 11:10 am. and when we got to the airport we were told that the flight was delayed until 11:30 am. No biggie. They finally boarded the plane at 11:30 am and then we sat on the runway for about half an hour. One might understand if there was questionable weather or there were lots of flights all wanting to go at the same time, but there wasn't, it was brilliant sunshine and about -1 C, and there was one other flight. To my mind this wasn't a problem as I didn't have to make any connecting flights and Meredith was expecting me sometime in the early afternoon. Most of the other people on the plane which was overbooked, by the way, had connecting flights. There were 17 military folks on their was to Edmonton for a special training before their next deployment for Afghanistan, a couple of military heading to Kingston, and so on. I know this because the flight attendant read out a list before we landed that read something like the 17 of you with the connecting flight to Edmonton your gate is at the other end of the airport and they may hold the plane for you because there are so many of you....run as fast as you can when we get there, you 2 people for Kingston your gate is right next to the one we are going to so you  may make your flight, and so on and so on.

I met the other three people who were terminating the flight in Toronto at the luggage carrousel. It went around and around and  around and nothing erupted onto the conveyor. Then the electronic sign that said the luggage from the Fredericton flight was going to be on carrousel 1 changed to a flight from Sudbury and we knew we were in trouble.