More weird dreams than I care to think about (I’m sure some of them would make interesting manga, but as a novel they’d be unworkable) kept me from decent sleep.
Today was our last day in Ontario and we intentionally had nothing planned beyond repacking. Alex went off caching, trying to find the one that was supposedly in the trees in St. Mary’s Cemetery, but without success. I started looking through all the pictures I’ve taken over the last few days. Cathy went into the office for a meeting.
Then, out of the blue, I got a text from Linda. No, not my mother, an old friend from the Onazine in high school. Linda and I have kept touch loosely on Facebook (because social media sucks, neither of us use it actively) and while she lives out by Port Dover, she wasn’t on our route to St. Thomas. She’s in town helping her stepfather with a medical appointment.
We met up at the Tim Horton’s at Ford and Royal Windsor for an all-too-brief meetup. It had been far too many years for me to contemplate, but she was easily the Linda I remembered. We reminisced about “The Boat” – her mother’s 1970-something Ford Thunderbird that Linda would swing into parking stalls with exceedingly practiced skill that amazed all of us, never once nicking anything. We talked about our lives since high school, our families, where our kids were, and so on. Linda is living what I currently see as an enviable life on a farm, considerably less fraught with the inanity and stupidity that I’ve been subjected to over the last many years.
But neither of us could stay long – she had family to attend to, and I had packing to complete.
And, apparently, a dishwasher to fix. Cathy’s total score of a $400 brand-new Bosch had a slight defect: there was a hole in the drain hose. We’d noticed water on the floor last night, but I’d passed it off as the feed line still having water in it. But when we ran the first real cycle, water was definitely leaking out.
Cathy went off to get some rubber waterproofing tape whilst I finished packing the 20 lbs of books she got me, along with several other heavy things. I was also supposed to finally collect a brick Cathy had saved from my childhood home, however due to space alone, it would have to wait until a future trip.
Wrapping up the tube took a while. We wanted to make sure it was tight without crushing the hose. The dishwasher was restarted and we waited for it to hit a purge.
Hilariously, it didn’t purge until we were long gone to the airport. It had only dawned on me as we left at 3:30pm that we were likely to hit rush hour traffic, and Google Maps is proving terrible at alternate routings to avoid congestion. We ended up sitting in a massive bung-up on the 403 between the QEW and Dundas before things lightened up. We hit another dead-slow section as the 401 collectors merged and divided just before the 427.
The car was refilled, despite us not having received a full tank (seriously, Sixt is terrible). The car was dropped with nary a word from the staff, we boarded the shuttle and headed back to the Viscount station, and the airport train to Terminal 3.
Because my bag was 1) hilariously overweight, and 2) contained the remainder of Janice’s ashes, we knew we had to go through checkin assistance. 30.5 kilograms. More than the other three bags combined. $100 to get it on the plane. The clerk was being overly helpful in suggesting that we could repack to disperse the concentrated weight, which I had to laugh off – there wasn’t a hope in hell that the two-volume deluxe Far Side Collection could go anywhere else, and we weren’t moving Janice elsewhere, either.
The original plan, because we had the time, was to use the WestJet lounge vouchers we acquired when we got the RBC WestJet Mastercard. However, on the way to the airport – stuck in traffic – I opted to research how the lounges worked, and discovered that Toronto doesn’t have a WestJet lounge.
Toronto. The single biggest and busiest airport in Canada (#16 in North America, just behind Newark and Houston) doesn’t have a lounge for the second-largest airline.
As it turns out the voucher can buy a discounted access to the third-party lounges. A 20% discount. And food is extra.
We went to Fionn McCool’s instead. Even at $14/pint, I’m sure we still paid less.
The flight boarded on time. And despite being full (not only of passengers but also roll-on bags, which should be completely banned within the cabin), we left early.
I edited photos and took a short nap. The flight was quiet and dark. Outside, the sun took an exceptionally long time to set as we chased it to the west. The ground below slipped under a thick layer of forest fire smoke that’s blanketing everything west of the Rockies. Even descending into Calgary, we couldn’t see a thing until we were under a couple thousand feet.
Calgary Airport seems to have returned to its glacial bag return processes, taking 45 minutes to finally bestow our belongings back to us. It gave Monkey a chance to get a snack from the 7-11.
Monkey drove us home, which I was thankful for as a murderous headache had taken root and even with two ibuprofen, was not leaving me alone. The roads were mostly empty at 23:30, so the trip was blissfully swift. I think I might have PTSD from watching drivers on Ontario’s highways.
The plan is to unpack, largely to get the things out I need for bed, a quick shower, and drop dead. I have work to do tomorrow.
The rest for the wicked is officially over.
