Wednesday, October 18, 2017

I wake at four and go back to sleep. Checkout time is eleven, and I should be at YYT by half-past two, which means lunch near the car rental at noon, drop off the car, then fixed-price cab to the airport. I will arrive home at, oh, I arrive home when I arrive home.

This is the first driving holiday since 1990 when I can say that my written logs (in this case web-compiled photo-essays) are all up to date. This is the first driving holiday since 1990 when I can say that my bank and credit card statements are all fully reconciled with my expenses spreadsheet. On top of that I paid the credit card balance last night.

Being so up-to-date is all on account of Metrobus (long may its name rot in hell) and my poor scheduling of these last four days.

Everything is spread out on the queen-size bed, and I have devised a cunning plan worthy of Baldrick . I shall pack everything heavy in my cloth bag – laptop, backup drive, books, papers, maps and so on. I shall pack all the light stuff (dirty laundry, clean clothes, ½ bag of ground coffee and the like) in the floor and the roomy end-pockets of my shoulder bag. I shall then lay the heavy shoulder bag on the material in my shoulder bag.

When the script-following clerk at the check in scales says “You have to remove nine-tenths of a kilogram from your shoulder bag”, I shall extract the nine-kilogram cloth bag and we will re-weigh the shoulder-bag to find that it now weighs only nine-tenths of a kilogram.

I shall book to see a left-arm and shoulder-specialist in Toronto using the airport’s free WiFi while waiting for the plane to arrive and the pain to subside.

The hardest part of packing, for me, is trying not to think like a terrorist. I wrap various souvenirs, computer cables, drives, chargers and other regular stuff and my mind goes into hyper-mode: “Just supposing this WAS a bomb component. How could I get it past security ...” and it takes will power to think of something else and just wrap the ice-cream in newspaper and assemble the cables with twist-ties and drop the collection into a re-used plastic bag that used to hold oatmeal.

But it is no use.

As I push the half-bag of apples into my heavy-bag I find myself picturing the scene at check-in where I remove the apples, one-by-one, putting them into coat (I will be wearing two coats) and trouser pockets until we are one apple shy of nine kilograms. I take one more apple from the bag and begin to much on it. The scales drop to nine kilos. I place the half-eaten apple on the counter and walk triumphantly towards security, burping as I go.

So, here I am. Not even ten, and I am packed and ready to go. Perhaps I will break my rule and go wander a shopping mall near the car rental.

A premonition told me to photograph the jams, in case they were broken en route.

The morning is beautiful. Here is a shot looking north, direction Holyrood. I have been blessed with good weather. I’d say only two miserable days, and one of them was committed to a long drive – St Anthony to St George’s, almost 900Km.

After visiting Metrobus (long may its name rot in hell) I now have a very good grasp of the highways outside and inside St John’s, and after only ten minutes negotiating the back streets I find myself at Avalon Mall. And all this time I thought I could get there from Kenmount Road. Later on I found that I could, but the signs, if they exist, didn’t catch my eye.

There is a gas station in the plaza. Enterprise is right across the street. Handy.

I think this is the closest I have been to St John’s Crane.

St John’s, Newfoundland in general, is much smarter than Toronto. In Toronto we have quiet little signs suggesting “If it’s OK with you, please don’t smoke within nine metres”, but Newfoundland paints a broad red line to thwart those who plead ignorance and say “Oh, I thought it meant within nine inches of the entrance”.

Here is that name Fog City again. I shall dine here.

They serve local foodstuffs.

I rarely take photos of meals, but here I made an exception. The cooking was perfect. I suspect that the chef keeps a photograph of a steaming kettle to hand, and after dicing the broccoli he waves the photograph at the broccoli once, twice, and that’s it. Firm, but not crispy. And just as tasty as the carrot sticks. I suspect that he uses the same photo for the carrots, not a separate one.

Mussells, shrimp, cod tongue and salmon, since you ask.

After lunch I went to gas up and return the car to Enterprise. Along the way I played Car Park Roulette.

Car Park Roulette is best played at Christmas Time, at most two days before Christmas, especially if Christmas falls on a Sunday or Monday. The parking lot has to be packed.

In my case I had arrived relatively early at the mall, and chose to park well away from the building. My theory is that it is easier to spot your rental car if it is the only silver-gray car next to the Big Green Dumpster, but by the time I waddled away from Fog City, the little Kia was part of a vast collection of silver-grey cars, and I had to walk across a half-dozen files of cars whose drivers are spending ten minutes cruising to find a parking stop only ten seconds away from the doors.

Well! Who am I to deprive them of hope?

I make a sharp right to head north and dangle the car keys from my outside hand as I walk down a file of cars. I know that the driver behind me is waiting to make use of my space. Two cars away from the end of the file, I duck between the cars to emerge on the next file. The vulture observes this, and burns rubber around the last two cars and continues to stalk me.

“This machine is going to pay off! I can FEEL it”. I am now heading south, playing with the keys to indicate my eagerness to make a space for the sap behind me who, it should be noted, has collected two more cars at walking pace. My walking pace, after a delightlful lunch.

At the end of this file, I duck between cars and walk the third file northwards again. We all seven of us continue in this manner until I slap my forehead, showing what an idiot all seven vultures have been, and make a dash for The Green Dumpster, miles away from the Mall Entrance doors, leaving the puzzled citizens to re-circle until they find another shopper dangling car keys.

Enterprise were generous and gave me a lift to the airport. I suspect they had to go there anyway to ferry a vehicle back to Kenmount, but they saved me a $30 cab fare and $5 tip, so Hooray for Enterprise.

More than generous. I had thirty minutes or so to pump them with questions about roads and driving. The two guys confirmed my theory of “Keep Right Except To Pass” and other issues.

Time to check in. I already have a boarding pass. The clerk didn’t need to see the confrmation number on my phone, didn’t need a printout of the confirmation (as the email said I should). I was all ready with an explantion “I couldn’t find a print shop in Fleur de Lys”, but it was wasted effort. Same clerk did, however, ask if I had any jam. Well, I did. A set of jars for a friend. Has to be jettisoned. Or I can pay an extra half-million dollars and check my carry-on bag.

I am never good at thinking in these circumstances. I panic easily at the thought of losing sugary treats.

I raced outside and managed to thrust them through the driver’s side window of a puzzled cab driver. Who knows? It may be the first time he has tasted jam. I was madder’n a wet hen, because I had planned to claim the empty jars back as storage devices once the jars were emptied, Double-loss, from my point of view.

My bag weighed in at thirteen point something, well over the 9Kg limit, so Nice Lady who made me shed my jam allowed me to take my grocery second bag out and we reweighed my shoulder bag, now down to 7Kg.

Gaaaaah! Then we had to weigh my grocery bag to confrm that thirteen minus seven is six.

Who dreams up these rules and regulations?

Clearly idle bureaucrats with time on their hands, sitting in a narrow seat on the tarmac on Halifax or Montreal, I’ll be chair-bound.

Or waiting for a #16 bus out at Metrobus Centre.

Because I was early I ascended the stairs to the Observation Deck out at St John’s International Airport. The deck announces Arrivals, but not Departures, so you have to pace yourself with crossword puzzles and check your watch far too often. I don’t wear a watch, which makes matters worse for me.

Time to go. Being totally jam-less, I went through security, laptop and bag and belt from trousers on trays. No Problems. Except for my thoughts.

Why is a jar of jam a lethal device, but a pair of very sharp collapsable nail-scisors not a threat? And I’ll swear on a stack of recipe books that no-one took the half-full aluminium foil sack of ground coffee from its double-wrapped plastic bags to check that it wasn’t Potassium Nitrate. I mean just two of us with KNO3, and C11H22O6 in ground coffee bags and we would be in business.

Sealed jars of jam from Dark Tickle in jars labelled Dark Tickle in a plastic bag labeled Dark Tickle are a threat to civil aviation. I wonder if fighter-jet pilots bring jam sandwiches from home for their lunch. He wrote bitterly.

I thought that this was our plane. It is here, adjacent to where the sheep and cattle sit waiting to be told what to do.

Actually, I enjoy the business at airports. If ever I feel unsure, I just show whatever piece of paper is in my hand to ANYONE wearing any kind of uniform, and they tell me where to go. I am a little like those small children with a cardboard label around their neck being evacuated from London during the Second World war. Everyone is my Nanny.

If I am at the wrong queue, I may be escorted to the head of another queue where I should have been for the past half-hour, and once I am fully-registered, I’ll hear my name called over the P.A. System if I am engrossed in a crossword puzzle.

Boarding was delayed due to a version of “Crew checking the system”, or similar. I don’t object to that. If the pilot and/or co-pilot want to check the landing gear and rubber tyres one more time, I’m with them, especially as these Porter Flights are not non-stop. We take off and land three times, six uses for the rubber tyres while I am gripping the arm rests to make sure that they don’t fall off my seat.

I am rational and know that I am safer in an aeroplane than in a car, but I also believe that aeroplanes are designed to be at their best when they are in the air, and they perform well as a lump of metal sitting on the ground. It’s the transition between ground and air at high speed that worries me the most.

Boarding began around 15:45, and as called, row by row, passengers left their padded chairs in the departure lounge and made their way outside where, when my batch (rows one through five) was called last of all,

And there everyone stood, having vacated their padded seats for the privilege of standing in a corridor, every one of them looking as if they were being processed by the headmaster with six cuts of the cane for bad behaviour.

I wouldn’t stand for it myself, and so sat down at the end of the line on a flight of concrete steps, crosswords to thigh, if not to hand.

Then! The line began to move.

Yep! Now we can all line up in the breeze that has arisen, waiting to board our plane which you may have noticed is not hooked up to one of those enclosed birth-canal like structures.

There is talk of setting up a second bay for aircraft. Just Kidding. This is part of the expansion plan for St John’s International Airport. You can fly from here direct to London UK, probably take you about five and a half hours. Already you can fly from here to Toronto, which can take as long as eight and a half hours.

Next time I’ll fly to London UK.

Here is a screen snapshot of part of the emailed itinerary.

That 15:25 time is when we are scheduled to be pushed back from the gate by a tractor. Take-off from the runway should be about five to ten minutes later. (I recall a different airline’s flight from Chicago to Toronto when we spent so much time taxiing and waiting on the tarmac that the Captain broke away and went back to the terminal to top up the fuel tanks)

I think that with the 90-minute time difference between Toronto and St John’s that this should be a six hours fifteen minute flight.

The flight home was bad, and I am of the mind to avoid flying Porter Airlines again. Boarding was scheduled for 3:05p.m. local time, and I turned my phone to Airplane mode and logged events throughout the afternoon, evening and night.

Boarding was scheduled for five past three, and I was at the airport well before that, but let’s be generous and take 15:05 as the time at which I place myself into the hands of Porter Airlines.

Now one of Porter Airline’s mantras is that we should arrive early because “The doors close twenty minutes before takeoff so that we can all leave on time”, or simliar. But this does not apply when Chris Greaves is en route.

And here I insert a word of caution: When you are reading the Toronto Advertiser of a morning and see a list of cities that Porter Airlines will fly you to, your eye alights on “St John’s” and you find yourself thinking “Why not! It can’t be more than three hours flight”, but you see, Porter Airlines doesn’t fly from Toronto to St John’s. It flies from Toronto to Montreal, and from Montreal it doesn’t fly to St John’s; it flies to Halifax. And only then when it has run out of other options does it drag its sorry ass into St John’s.

The same is true in reverse. I am not flying to Toronto. I am flying to Halifx, then flying to Montreal, and as a last resort (in a manner of speaking), flying to Toronto.

Three landings means three takeoffs, and that means three times the opportunities for delays while on the gorund.

And so it proved to be.

Also three performances by the same stewardess showing me how to fasten a seat-belt buckle, and how to release it.

In 1962, home for the summer vacation, and allowed the use of my parent’s car, I paid to have installed seat belts in the front seats, so by January 1962 I was familiar with seat belts and the sanity of buckling up the instant you got in the car; before you turned the ignition key.

Why in 2017, fifty-five years later, am I being instructed three times on how to fasten a seat belt? In My Not So Humble Opinion, anyone who doesn’t know how to buckle up deserves to die. And give me back my jam!

Do stewardesses make good actresses? They have to stand in front of a captive audience, half of whom are playing with their smartphones or trying to talk a fellow-passenger into a supper date at the other end. The stewardess has to smile even though the dog died that morning, or they had to jettison some jam, and they have to play the part. It’s a tough life, and I am glad that I am retired.

I contemplate my lovely window seat. I was “15A” on the way out. “A” is a window seat, for sure, and now I know that the cabins are two aisles of two seats each, “5D” is going to be a window seat, well ahead of the landing gear and engine pods, so with a good view, and so it happened to be.

I was briefly elated that I hadn’t splurged another half-million dollars to reserve a Window seat on the way out and the way back when two “ping!”s rang, the seat-belt and no smoking lights came on and a thought popped up into my mind. I must have been the only passenger who heard three “Ping!”s at that time.

Here is my idea: On these three-hop flights, Porter Airlines will assign window seats to those who are going all the way, assigning the aisle seats to the less-committed travelers. Moral: If you are going all the way, don’t pay for a window seat assignment.

But I digress.

We took off at 16:00 and arrived in Halifax at 18:06. I take my timestamps from the moment when we begin moving backwards from the gate, and when we we shudder to a halt at a gate. At 18:36 we are being pushed back from the gate when an argument re-escalates beyween an angry passenger (“I was only saying that ...”) and a stewardess. She says something on the intercom phone, motion stops. She opens the door, waits for the landing stairs, then crooks her little finger “Step outside the plane with me”. “Should I bring my bag?”. “Not yet” I wait for gunfire to erupt, but am not annoyed when it doesn’t happen.

I don’t know what went on outside. Obviously the captain was aware of it, as must have been the ground crew and the guys and gals in the control tower. Perhaps she took his pants down and spanked his bottom.

I think of Porter’s mantra “ ... so that we can all leave on time” and selfishly think that since we are already an hour or so late, why not leave the guy standing on the tarmac and let him work out how to catch up with, and reclaim, his luggage, in Montreal or Toronto? But that’s just my mean streak re-asserting itself.

At 18:53 we re-start our pushback

Now this is interesting. We are being pushed back at Halifax directly into the path of another turbo-prop. One of our propellers is visible, whirring loudly, at the right side of the photo.

The other plane has whirring propellers too, and that driver OWNS the Yellow Line.

If one of us doesn’t chicken out soon, I won’t need to buy ground beef for tomato sauce when I get home tomorrow.

Note the skyline. Looks a bit like sunset time, doesn’t it?

At 20:56 we are arrived in Montreal, scheduled to spend just 30 minutes here: Push passengers off the plane, scoop up empty beer cans in a plastic bag and, as it turns out, have another set-to with a different passenger.

This guy has brushed angrily past the boarding stewardess who has, presumably, asked to see the boarding pass. “It’s already been checked!” he snarls as he rushes past me, then he turns and yells “It’s already been checked!”.

Well. Maybe the stewardesses hand is still sore from the spanking in Halifax, because this time she halts all boarding and drags the out the captain, he calls out for the man to come back. Doesn’t. Captain starts walking down the plane. I think if it comes to fisticuffs I’m heading back to Newfoundland and am going to live there on Fish Brewis for the rest of my life. Sod this for a game of marbles.

The Captain and the Cad depart, off the plane, down the stairs where again I must imagine that the captain takes off his slipper and gives a few jolly good whacks across the calves, knowing that the RCMP are probably on their way.

Think about it: If the captain has halted the plane and exited the plane, then landing-stairs must be employed, and the plane has surely lost its take-off slot and hence its landing-slot at the other end. Go To The Back Of The Queue. Throw A Six And Start Again.

Passengers board, and at 21:38 we are pushed back from the gate. A thirty-minute stop-over has escalated to 42 minutes. Then we sit on the tarmac for about forty minutes.

Montreal is unique. At St John’s, Halifax and Toronto, annoucments are made in both English and French, Canada being officially bi-lingual. At Montreal, annoucments are made in both French and English, Canada being officially bi-lingual, but markedly more so in the Province of Quebec

We flew low to Toronto, it seemed to me that we were at about ten to fiteen thousand feet. I do know that the towns and houses and cars were quite visible, unlike when we are at twenty thousand or more.

We make contact in Toronto at 23:28 (by my Newfoundland clock). A flight that was scheduled as 6½ hours (with one of those hours spent trapped in the fuselage) has streteched an extra two hours. I am exhausted, and decide to take a cab.

By Thursday mid-day my calves were still aching from the stress of sitting still for over eight hours. On these Porter Airlines flight there is no galley area at the rear of the plane where one can do stretches, push-ups, or a quiet running-on-the-spot. And unlike two-aisle jumbo jets, there is no circular pathway one can walk around.

By my calculations we have spent 28%, almost a third of this trip sitting stationary on the ground, and that doesn’t include the 40-minutes on the tarmac at Montreal after being pushed back from the gate.

Outside in the warm dark night I find a cruising cab. There are no brightly-lit signs saying “Wait in line here if you want a cab”. The Porter Shuttle bus would take me to Union Station for free, but then I’d have to descend and wait for a subway train.

I hop in the cab and say “Take me to Police Headquarters!”. I have been dying to use that line for six years now, ever since I moved to live between Toronto Police Headquarters and the Coroner’s Court.

It’s a lot more fun, late at night, than asking for “Grenville Street, near Bay and College”

At ten past ten local time, the driver tells me it is twenty-one degrees celsius. What’s wrong with this city?

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