For some reason, members of my family seem to be stricken with some sort of travel curse this summer. So far, people have missed flights or shown up for their flights on the wrong day. I managed to check in for my flight to Canada at 8:00 AM instead of 8:00 PM. Now, I am not a morning person at all, and I always have a hard time sleeping before I travel, especially if I have to wake up in the middle of the night (6 AM) in order to get to the airport. I suppose I looked so stunned and pathetic when the ticket agent told me that I was 12 hours early for my flight, she quickly shoved a ticket in my hands and told me that the 8:30AM flight was boarding and wasn’t full, I would have to take a shuttle to the plane, so I should “Run!!!! RUN LIKE HOLY HECK!!!!”
I was too sleepy to run like holy heck, but I did walk very quickly. I thought I was going to be stranded in the airport, with my family expecting that I’d be coming in 12 hours later. I didn’t have the phone number of their hotel, and my mom and my little sister don’t turn on their cellphones before breakfast. I was contemplating getting a map from the helpful traveler’s aide people and getting myself to their hotel, but they called me back! They were coming to get me! Then as I was waiting outside I got another call from my little sister,
“We don’t know what airport you’re at.”
“What do you mean, I’m at the Toronto airport!”
“But there are two!”
“I’m at the big airport, its the only airport I’ve ever gone through when I’ve been in Toronto before!”
“But what is the name of the airport? Are you at Toronto International?”
“Well, I was coming in from another country, why wouldn’t I be?”
I proceeded to ask one of the traffic cops what was probably the most idiotic question he’d been asked in his whole career, “What airport is this?”
I was, of course, at Toronto International airport, not the mysterious other airport (I never even knew that Toronto had a second airport). And eventually the family minivan appeared on the horizon, and my airport adventures were over!
8:10 pm on July 30th, 2004 1
Toronto has a downtown airport, but it’s not international. Toronto International has 3 terminals: Air Canada, Terminal 2 (which used to be fore everyone else and is now only for some other flights) and Terminal 3 (newest, nicest). You should have taken your ballet shoes along so you could tour-en-toe (if not en-pointe).
4:28 pm on October 14th, 2004 2
Were your folks drinking? When one refers to ‘the airport,’ it’s Lester Pearson International Airport unless otherwise specified. Also, commercial flights coming from the U.S. (I assume you wee flying from the U.S. to Canada) land at Lester Pearson.
8:42 pm on October 14th, 2004 3
Unfortunately, my family manages to be just this stupid without the benefit of liquor
And to be fair, it was the first time they had ever gone to the airport in Toronto, whenever we’d visited there before we drove up. I imagine the whole saga happened with them looking up the airport on a map and getting really confused because there were two airports.