The Wild, White West

I should have known when I was in bed, listening to Matt Galloway on Tuesday morning. It was my birthday, and I was going to go to see patrick in Victoria. I was going to leave the house at 2, fly out of Hamilton at 4, and be in Victoria by 8 their time. 

Matt mentioned casually that Calgary had had some snow, and he hoped it wouldn’t come east. Funny, and I didn’t think too much of it. Until about 2, when I got an email from WetJet saying that my plane was going to be an hour late. This was followed hosrtly by another email stating it was now going to be two hours late. So I got on the phone, waited for over a half-hour, and got my ticket re-arranged so I would get on the 11 PM flight (I was going to miss the earlier one leving Calgary). Got to the airport, and got on the plane, which left as scheduled, about 2 hours late.

When we got to Calgary, we understood: they had been whallopped with almost two feet of snow! Nothing was moving. And the plane, as it landed, seemed to slide a bit on the frozen runway, but managed to keep in a straight line. So we got into Calgary at about 8:45PM, ready for our flight.

Well, the weather was not finished with us. Our pilot was still on his way to Calgry from somewhere else, and would be late, perhaps midnight. We were touchy, bordering on enraged, but, what can hyou do? We waited, and waited. And about midnight, they let us onto the plane. We settled in, they pushed back from the gate, and along came with this praying-mantis-like de-icing maching to spray down the wings so we wouldn’t crash: good idea. We were almost on our way. Until...a passenger felt ill. So we had to think about it a while, then returned to the gate so the woman could be taken to hospital. We finally took off—you guessed it—two hours late. By the time I got to the hotel, it was 2:30 AM in Victoria, 5:30 AM by my body’s clock. Bed was really nice, and fortunately it was comfortable and I slept well. And there was no snow in Victoria.

And there were some plusses/ When I woke about ten in the morning, I waas feeling pretty good. I went down to the hotel restaurant (Ruby’s) and had some wonderful bagels and smoked salmon, with capers fininshed by sauteeing (wonderful! I will try this at home). Plus, they were playing Aretha Franklin on their steroe from old LPs! Heaven.

And then an obligatory trip to Russell Books for some browsing, and a walk about town for a while. I talked with Pat, and we agreed to meet after his work. That gave me some hours to play. One of the things I did was go to check out the ncar rental possibilities. Turns out to be $65/day if I rented it the following day, and $42/day of I rented it tht day. So I rented it. I had arranged to go up and see my friend Paul Reynolds in Duncan the following day, and would also stop by the Finnies for a visit. So it made sense.

Met up with Pat after his work, and we walked back to his apartment. We decided to have supper out and then follow that with a viewing of Michael Moore’s new film about the Trump US. Nice evening; not a nice film (simultaneously disturbingly accurate and insightful, and disturbingly unfocussed and fuzzy). And so to bed.