It was a very, very, very long trip to Sydney Australia. Our trip started with a flight from Toronto to Houston. Followed by flight from Houston to Sydney. The flight to Houston was four hours. Our stop over in Houston was two hours. Finally, our flight to Sydney was eighteen hours. We left our home for Pearson International at 9am on Wednesday and got to our hotel ay 8am on Friday. Because we crossed the international dateline during the night it seems we lost Thursday. Because neither Marg nor myself can sleep on a plane, we were totally exhausted when we finally arrived at our hotel.
Our trip to Toronto was very slow due to an accident on the
401 east of Guelph. It cost us about thirty
minutes, but we had a large amount of spare time built into our schedule, so we
were there in plenty of time.
Pearson Terminal One is now back to normal. It is no longer
a zoo, and it doesn’t feel as crowded and rushed as was our experience last
summer.
We were booked on United Airlines for both flights. I would
give high marks to their staff. They
were very polite and helpful. We especially impressed by one ticket agent who
helped us navigate the American Homelands Security check in program. What a convoluted
mess that is.
Unfortunately, I can’t give a passing grade to their planes.
Both flights left much to be desired.
Our flight Houston was on a ERJ175 jet. As we were getting ready
to leave to the gate, the captain came on over the speaker and told us that on-board
computer had crashed and they had to shut down the entire plane and start
everything over again from scratch. This cost us about thirty minutes before we
got into the queue to be de-iced and got ready for takeoff. It kind of makes
you wonder how safe the plane is. We’ve had softer seats at a Mount Brydges
Cougar’s hockey game. My butt was numb
by the time we reached Houston. Also the
ERJ175 has no entertainment systems, so it was a long quiet/boring trip.
Our flight to Sydney was on a Boeing 787. It might have been one of the most turbulent flights we have ever taken. It’s not that the turbulence was extremely violent, but it was constant for the entire flight. The entertainment system for my seat failed about four hours into the flight. They just couldn’t reset it, so they found me an empty seat and I was able to watch several movies. United’s selection of movies is extremely poor. I started watching two movies but turned them off after about fifteen minutes. One was call Black Adam, which is a DC action figure and the other was a BAFTA nominated comedy called Brian and Charles. Boring and pretentious are how I would describe this waste of time. Most of the rest of the films seem to be at least two years old.
We lucked out. A couple of hours after we left Toronto, a
bad ice and snow storm hit our area. We
lost power in Port Stanley for an extended period of time. It seems there were also multiple
cancellations of flights out of Toronto.
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