Short visit, long trip

I'm in Kelowna with the kiddos. We're having a nice visit, as usual, but man--the trip out here was unbelievable! I must preface this tale by saying that the whole reason I made this spur-of-the-moment trip was a great deal on airfare. At these prices, I thought, I can afford a quick pre-Christmas trip--just me and the kids.

Tom and I got up at 5 a.m. last Friday morning, got the kids ready and headed to the airport for the first leg of our trip, a direct flight to Vancouver. Usually I try to fly thru Toronto or Calgary, as the Vancouver connection adds an extra hour or more to an already long trip. This time, the extra hour in the air turned out to be the least of our worries.

The trip to Vancouver was uneventful, except for a delay of about half an hour before takeoff for de-icing. But right before we were supposed to board our connecting to Kelowna from YVR, takeoff was delayed by 20 minutes. That stretched to an hour, then an hour and a half. We finally boarded the plane around 1 p.m. and took off. So far, so good. It was snowing in Kelowna, and there was a 1-hour period when planes couldn't land due to conditions on the ground. Of course, this was the hour when our connecting flight from Vancouver was trying to land. We were supposed to arrive around 12:30 p.m. on Friday. Instead, at 2 p.m. we circled the Kelowna airport twice before the captain decided we couldn't safely land, and headed back to Vancouver. Flight canceled!

If that wasn't bad enough, when we got on the ground I was informed that the earliest flight they could rebook us on left on Saturday at 7:20 p.m. We were stranded! By this point I'd been up since 5 a.m. Eastern time after getting 4 hrs of sleep the night before, spent almost 7 hours on the plane from Ottawa to Vancouver, over 2 hrs on the ground at YVR, and 1.5 hrs on the
tiny plane from Van to Kelowna. Wrangling two small children the whole time. I was completely out of food and down to 2 diapers. I didn't have it in me to stick around the airport any longer and try for a standby flight that day.

The one good thing about being stranded in Vancouver is that I have connections. I took a cab to my aunt's house, which is near the airport, to consider our options and have a bit of a visit. She doesn't have the room or the gear to put me up with two kids in tow, so I needed a hotel. Air Canada had a discount available at an inn near the airport, but I had no desire to be stuck at the airport all day, with no car, in a less than full-service hotel. So I decided the best course would be to go to abetter hotel right downtown. I found a decent rate online for the Hyatt, so we took a cab downtown and arrived around 7 p.m. Both kids were so sound asleep in the cab by that point that I had to shake Henry repeatedly and yell at him to get him into the hotel. I got them to bed within the hour, poured a bath for myself and cracked an overpriced beer from the minibar. I was asleep by 8:30 local time.

Dexter started waking up at 2 a.m., and both kids were wide awake by 5, starving, and I was totally strung out. So as soon as room service opened at 6 I had pancakes and a huge carafe of coffee delivered to the room. All this cost a fortune, but the service was exactly why I checked into a full service hotel. Plus, it was a really nice room. We spent the morning there chilling out and resting.

I used another connection in the afternoon to entertain the boys and make the most of our stay. My friend and former roommate, Jolie, was home that day and had no plans, so she and her kids met us at Science World for the afternoon. We were able to take Skytrain from our hotel, another reason why I wanted to stay downtown. The kids had fun, and Jolie and I got to have an unexpected visit.

Anyway, we made the most of our unscheduled layover, but man--what rotten luck. The Kelowna airport was closed for barely 1 hour on Friday. By the time we landed on Saturday evening, the snow was all gone. I ended up spending a small fortune on the hotel, taxis, food and other expenses while we were stranded. So much for my cheap, last-minute trip to see the grandparents. But I did what I had to do to stay sane while alone and exhausted with the two kids. Sometimes you can be thrifty when you travel; other times you just think, "this is what credit cards are for" and charge your way out of a bad situation.

Both kids were as good and patient as I could possibly have hoped during all this, but it's just a lot of hard work to keep everything together and everyone happy in those circumstances. Let's hope our flight home tomorrow goes a lot more smoothly. I don't have any connections in Calgary to see us through!