We’re off on a wonderful Road Scholar trip, again. This is # 8 in three years, so clearly, we like them. Getting to the starting point was a bit of an adventure, though.
We are spending about two weeks in Newfoundland and Labrador. (Yes, it is gorgeous, and this post gives me a chance to use some photos in that have little to do with the story of our arrival.) Months ago, when we looked into getting to Deer Lake Newfoundland, the starting point of our program, it seemed to make the most sense to drive to Montreal and take an Air Canada domestic flight from there to Deer Lake. A fairly short, direct flight – what could possibly go wrong?
We had smooth sailing on departure day, except maybe a little impatience from “my driver,” at the border where we waited for more than an hour for our 60 seconds of an entry interview. We found the park-and-fly hotel, ate a Greek dinner, and had a fun conversation about the US and Canada with our barely-in-her-twenties server. The next morning, the shuttle to the airport got us to our departure gate with loads of time to spare. Time in the airport, it turned out, was going to be in abundance.
Our flight from Montreal to Deer Lake was delayed, again and again, due to mechanical problems. They fixed one and then found another. They switched aircraft, and then found another problem. Twenty dollar vouchers to make appeasement purchases in the Montreal airport appeared in Mark’s email. We sought advice about leaving the gate for some food. “I think you’re safe to leave for at least 15 minutes,” the gate agent said, apologetically, and with a lack of facetiousness that would have been completely appropriate to the situation.
Finally, after about a six hour delay, they cancelled our flight all together.
There is a saying in Newfoundland: There are no accidental tourists. It’s just too hard to get here. Everyone who visits makes a deliberate decision, and we really wanted to get here!
Thanks/no thanks to algorithms, Mark got an email with a re-booking, almost immediately. The bad news was, it would have us miss the whole first day of the trip and meet up with our group at its second hotel location.
We trotted over to customer service and (fortunately) hardly had to wait to plead our case. The agent found us a new flight, printed boarding passes and told us to hustle over to the gate because it was boarding in five minutes. He also let us know we should have low expectations about our checked luggage making the flight.
We quickly moved to the gate, and presented our boarding passes. Rejected! They were not printed with the correct code. The gate agent called the customer service agent and told him to reprint them correctly. We ran back to customer service, cut the line (how it pains me to write that confession, but what else were we to do?) and the customer service agent said, “I’m working on your new passes right now.”
With pounding hearts and new boarding passes in hand, we jogged back to the gate, and were permitted to board!
All this thrill, to head, not east to Newfoundland, but west— to Toronto. In Toronto we found our connection, which was delayed, to Deer Lake. We landed just after midnight– a very, very long day.
Our low expectations about having our checked luggage arrive with us were easily met. That, of course, meant finding the Air Canada lost luggage desk in the Deer Lake airport (piece of cake), and making an arrangement to have our luggage delivered to us when it arrived.
Americans love to endorse the niceness of Canadians, and I’ll add my voice to that chorus. Every Air Canada agent we worked with was calm and earnestly trying to help us. Newfoundland is a pretty small community, and it was easy to leave the airport feeling like the person who would deliver our bags would easily be able to find our hotel at Cow Head, the next evening. The next day we were tired, but we had only missed the evening orientation, not the first full day of the trip.
I am, however, the daughter of a dentist. I am seasoned enough to know to carry medications, chargers, and a warm layer in my carry on. A toothbrush, though, did not make the cut. But since our original flight plan had no connection, I felt pretty safe. Famous last words.
So, during the whole rebooked trip of moving west to eventually head east, all I could think about was a toothbrush and dental floss. At 1:00 am in the morning, as we entered the quiet hotel lobby in Deer Lake, I saw that they sold sundries. I had a couple of toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste in my hand and was back at the registration desk before the clerk had even passed us our key.
He was beyond cheerful for the middle of the night.
“Well, you can buy these if you want,” he said. “But I can also give you free ones.”
“Oh my goodness! You don’t know how happy that would make me!” I said.
He was back in a flash. I decided to push my luck.
“Any chance you have a free comb?” I asked.
“Sure! I have those also! Do you both want one? Should I bring two?”
Perhaps because I am American, and not as nice as a Canadian, I know how to be facetious, even in the wee hours of the morning. I turned to Mark and asked, “Would you like a comb?”
Mark pulled off his hat and grinned. “Don’t think I’ll need one,” he said, showing his buzzed head.
The toothbrush made it through the necessary job, at bedtime and morning. We did our best to get some sleep, and at least packing up to depart was not time consuming.
In our experience, Road Scholar participants have always been warm and caring. At breakfast, we were greeted with cheerful concern and a little notoriety. All day long, the other participants asked if we’d heard updates about our luggage. I began to think that, if our luggage didn’t show up, someone might even donate a length of dental floss to me.
I am happy to report that I’m writing this with very clean teeth. I’m buying air tags for our suitcases when we get home, and I will never, ever board plane without a toothbrush and dental floss, again.
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