It was not a smooth ending to our trip!
Our prearranged taxi did not appear at 6 P.M. however there was no problem as another taxi drove by shortly after we gave up on the first one. Our "great deal" on taxi rate with the prearranged taxi turned out to be slightly more expensive than the one we actually used. Ha ha! - live and learn I guess!
We got through United's check in with no problem,then through security and then had to complete passport control. That took quite a while however we had lots of time to kill so no problem.
We took off a little late at about 10:30 PM and then 10 hours later we were in Houston. Caro slept a good bit of the flight but as before on the way down I did not get any decent hours of sleep. I listened to many hours of podcasts.
Houston was a gong show. We arrived late and by now had only an hour and 10 minutes to get to our Air Canada flight. In our immigration entry line there were only 2 officers for the approximately 60 people a head of us. OH NO!! YIKES
Finally through that mess we were now in a serious time crunch. We got our luggage with no problem, put it on the "Connecting Passengers" baggage belt, thought we were home free to try and make our way to our next flight, but "No", there was ANOTHER security line to check our carry on (even though I'm pretty sure we were still in the secure area of the airport). Now we were in trouble. We probably had less than 15 minutes before our flight was scheduled to lift off and as luck would have it Air Canada is in a different terminal. Let the quick jogging begin! We hoofed it out from the far end of terminal C; caught the terminal transfer train to terminal A and continued hoofing it to the far end of terminal A only to discover that the gate doors had already been closed for boarding any more passengers. Damn!
I had anticipated issues with this connecting flight when I first made the reservations and really couldn't understand why it was considered a "legal" connection but wasn't too concerned as I knew there was another flight to Calgary a couple of hours later.
The Air Canada representative at the (now) closed gate door asked if we had connections and of course we did. She muttered under her breath to herself "the next flight is cancelled". At this point she entered the codes to open the boarding gate doors, went inside and found out the doors to the plane were not closed, so "bless her heart" she came back out and got us on the flight! Thank you Air Canada!
The Calgary flight was good, and the immigration was easy. We were not over our duty free limit and carried on to the Edmonton flight having noted that our bags would have transferred without us picking them up (the same as when Dad and I went to Europe and had landed initially in Toronto).
We got in to Edmonton on time but our bags didn't.
We were assured they would be right behind us on another flight but as it turned out they were not! Boo Air Canada!
My bag arrived 3 days later and as of this writing ( 5 days later) Caros' is supposed to have just arrived in Edmonton. The problem appears to be originating in Houston.
We had an awesome time on this trip, seeing many great sights, and enjoying ourselves immensely. We did a lot of walking and the totals according to my cell phone (not including any sea days while on the cruise) were 227.6 kilometres/ 350,650 steps.
