The complete story of our return trip…
Monday, March 27th, 2006The earlier post already mentioned that the journey from Banff was quite tiresome, here’s the complete story;
We planned to fly back on Friday from Calgary to Vancouver, then with KLM to Amsterdam, scheduled to arrive nicely on Saturday end of the morning…in order to do so we woke up earrrrrly on Friday morning (before 6am), drove the car from Banff to Calgary Airport (still a good 1.5 hour drive) and delivered it back to AVIS. Plan was to take an early flight so we would have more than enough time in Vancouver to hop on the KLM jet. As we were flying on standby, it’s always better to have enough time…
Well, what we didn’t know was that following the start of springbreak in British Colombia (Vancouver), which was rally convenient for our trip two weeks before (NOT!), this weekend was start of the springbreak in Alberta (Calgary)…..aaaahhhhhhh!!!! That meant that we again were surrounded by 100’s of teenagers with valid tickets to Vancouver…ggrrrrrr!!! After trying to get a seat on any plane for some hours, we felt it wouldn’t work out this time…the number of people on standby grew with every flight (40+ people on the waitlist per flight!!!) and our rank was last of the last 🙁 🙁
What to do; well we could ofcourse get the car back from AVIS, since it officially still had one day left on the rental period and drive it to Vancouver, ‘just’ a 900km drive. Or take the Greyhound overnight…either way we would miss the KLM flight on Friday and would anly be able to take it on Saturday…that is *if* there were seats available, still a gamble.
Luckily we saw the light (that was just before we started banging our heads against the wall); perhaps we could trade in our Calgary-Vancouver and Vancouver-Amsterdam ticket for a Calgary-….Europe (Frankfurt or London) ticket?!?!
It turned out that this actually worked out and so we were able to leave Calgary with the 17:45h Air Canada flight to Frankfurt!!!
The flight itself was OK, arrived late Saturday morning in Frankfurt, booked tickets from Frankfurt to Amsterdam and finally arrived home little after 3pm!
Last thing (actually expected since we seem to have a subscription on it) was our luggage.
Two weeks before things got mixed up as the luggage stayed in Vancouver while we nearly made it on the flight to Calgary…this time it *was* sent to Vancouver while we stayed in Calgary…thank you Air Canada for screwing this one up, again!
Actually this was not too bad; as we couldn’t check the luggage in for the Frankfurt flight from Calgary, we travelled light and made arrangements for the luggage to be delivered to our home…great service, and free! 🙂 🙂
