Almost didn’t make it home for Christmas.

We were booked to come home from New York on Sunday Dec 21 but with storms, cancellations, delays, Christmas, overbooked flights, standby, hours in airport lounges … the outlook was bleak.

By Monday night, they’d dumped us in Montreal airport and told us we had no hope of getting a flight home until 27th December.

Huh? December 27? Two days after Christmas? How the *&^(%*$ did that happen?

But this was not a time for deconstructive analysis. We had to act and act fast.

There was only one thing to do: rent a car and drive through the night to get home.

So, we grabbed another airport refugee, stuffed all our bags in a rented hybrid car, and drove and drove and drove.

And drove.

I talked and talked and talked about everything and nothing to keep the driver alert and engaged. “My, I never knew there were so many shades of darkness!” That sort of thing. Riveting.

Then it was my turn to take the the wheel and white knuckled it over dark, unfamiliar roads covered in ice and plumes of blowing snow. Outside was -18 C or something silly like that. We were in the middle of nowhere. Breakdown was not an option. But in my mind it lurked around every dark corner.

It was just about do-able until the 18-wheelers roared up from behind and passed us creating a vacuum that pulled us in making it hard to keep the car steady on the icy surface.  As a calling card, they’d leave a big mushroom cloud of dusty snow just to make it a little harder to see.  Nice.

Nineteen hours later we pulled up in front of our house, exhausted, eyes stinging with fatigue, legs stiff from driving, white knuckles aching with the strain, but so happy to be home.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw a bag of dog poo with a greenish tinge. But it was a very happy bag of greenish dog poo.

This came after another epic journey – 14 hours – getting to New York in a blizzard last Wednesday.

I know there is a moral to this story but I’m too rat-arsed tired to think of it right now.

Please feel free to offer one up.

« Off to New Yawk … again
Ho Ho’s been here »


This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Canada, travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.