1st Wedding Anniversary - Winter Solstice

Yesterday was the first day of my wedding anniversary, and one of the crappiest days of my life.

We booked a chalet for the week months ago… to get out of the city. It’s at the Laurentian Mountains, up in Canada. It’s next to the lake, and comes with its own kitchen and a fireplace. It has no wireless internet and probably no phone reception. There promises to be snow and a week of time where we can concentrate on each other and nothing else.

I was underwater for the past couple of weeks writing about Yuan dramas and theatrical languages and debating the truthfulness in sixth generation films and soul separation stories before that. So, I had no idea about any snowstorm anywhere. Excepting that a friend telling me it’s snowing heavily in Boston and another friend that I met a day before telling me there’s a snowstorm up north, but she said I should miss it. I did check the weather forecast in Montreal a day before and there’s prediction of snow in the afternoon, but nothing about a snowstorm.

It started when we reach the airport at 930am. It should be too early because our flight is at 1120. But somehow, the self-check in refuses to work for us and we had to queue up at a queue for problematic people, a long queue with a long range of counters and only two people managing it. The queue took about an hour and by the time we got our boarding passes, it’s already 1050, the boarding time printed on the pass.

We made a run for it, rushing through security and literally running our gates, only to realize that the plane was delayed to 12 noon anyway. So, we relaxed and I took out my book. Then they announced that our plane didn’t have a crew, and they have to delay until they find a crew. And they found the crew and so we just have to wait until the crew checked the plane. And then they announced that our plane don’t have a pilot, and we could either wait until the pilot (which is scheduled to arrive at the airport at 2pm from Manchester), or we could hope that someone approves a switch of pilot. And then they announced the happy news that the pilot switch is approved and we could board.

And we finally boarded. And P fell asleep. I’m already half-way through the book but I figured I’m safe because the flight is only an hour and a half. But then they announced that the weather conditions in Montreal is bad and they have to delay the flight and we have to deplane. I woke P up (and he thought I woke him up because we arrived!) By now, it’s 1pm. And we should have touched down in Montreal already.

There were repeated announcements, saying that the flight is delayed and not cancelled. So we waited. At 2pm, they finally announced that the flight is cancelled. And we started queuing to check if we were rebooked. And this is the really horrible part. The queue was horribly long and at about 330pm, our gate counter said that they have to start boarding the second plane, and we could either wait until she’s done boarding and she’ll deal with us, or we could queue at the customer service line, a line snaking so long you literally cannot see the end. To cut the long story short, the gate counter service lady lied, she boarded the 4pm flight and then disappeared and never came back. We finally got to the head of the customer service line after an hour and half of queuing, only to be told that we were rebooked for 7am the next morning, and we can’t possibly get a flight out tonight. And they weren’t sure about the weather conditions tomorrow and if the plane would take off. And no, they don’t know anything about refunds and we aren’t getting hotel vouchers to stay for the night. Not knowing all our options, we couldn’t make a decision.

So we began calling expedia, another an hour and a half waiting on the phone as a girl with a kind voice made apologies as she tried to check our options. The conclusion is that we can get our money back. And at this point, we really didn’t want to spend the night of our first wedding anniversary in the airport, neither do we want to spend tomorrow in the airport if the flight gets cancelled again. And this may sound weird, but I kept having this little feeling in me that we aren’t meant to go on this trip… and all these are signs. The repeated delaying, the cancelling, the fact that we can’t get on a flight tonight etc etc. We aren’t supposed to go.

So at approximately 7pm, we decided to cut our losses and take the refund and go home. Only, we can’t find our luggage. So we spent another hour asking odd people (coz we didn’t want to queue another hour and half at the customer service line to ask) and finally found a counter responsible, only to be told that we can’t get our luggage today.

And thus everything resulted in as arriving at our apartment at 9pm, exactly 12 hours after we left it. Tired and feeling crappy and without our luggage.

So not the way I wanted to spent the first day of our wedding anniversary.

But, there were moments in the waiting when I would look over at the guy sitting next to me. The guy who is complaining and blaming me and saying irritating stuff like, “We are never going on a trip ever again” that really doesn’t help. And the same guy who is queuing by me, and asking me if I’m hungry and doing everything he can to make me a little more comfortable and trying to make little jokes to cheer me up.

The guy who would never leave me, whether I fly to Montreal tonight or go home.

Through weal and woe. Perhaps this is a proof of what we are supposed to go through and this first day of our wedding anniversary is woe.

If so, the second day darn right better with weal. And now I have to go drag my husband away from the computer (the first and foremost reason why I booked a chalet with no internet access in the first place!) to remind him that today isn’t a day for computer games.