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We get a late night message from a mysterious stranger asking if he can meet us for breakfast to show us “something really cool”. Perhaps unsurprisingly we don’t usually accept invitations like these, but this sounds intriguing, and anyway, if he’s going to try to murder us or do something else shifty, surely he wouldn’t do it in broad daylight in front of a whole bunch of people in the hotel restaurant. He pulls a small box discretely from his pocket, and we wait with bated breath as he opens it. Cocaine or heroin perhaps? That’s not what it looks like, although that said I’m not sure either of us would know a line of cocaine (it’s slightly concerning that I know that cocaine comes in “lines” - too much late night TV perhaps) if it jumped up and squirted us up the nose. He asks us a few very serious questions, and then swears us to secrecy about the next part of his clandestine plan. I hope the Canadian drug authorities aren’t reading this, but on the off chance that they are, if they want to make an arrest, the mysterious stranger tells us that we should meet up with him again at Niagara Falls in about ten days time, when all will be revealed. He gets up from the table and disappears quietly off into the night, well he would have if it was still dark….
Today we fly across the country to Quebec City. We’ve been told that the people there are more French than the French, so if we want to avoid starving and/or sleeping at the airport we’d better brush up on the lingo. This is a bit worrying - “oui”, “merci” and “passez vous un beer s'il vous plait” are about it for us. But it seems we may have a bit more study time up our sleeves than we thought. We arrive in Calgary after the long and boring two hour drive from Lethbridge to find that our flight to Toronto has been delayed. This isn’t good; now we’ll miss our Quebec connection. But according to the Air Canada computer this is all fine; we can do the second leg tomorrow morning instead. So it seems we’ve got a night sleeping on the Toronto airport floor to look forward to… with French phrase books for company of course. Hmmm.
We stand in a queue in search of a Plan B. If our limited experience is anything to go by, 100% of airport queues are now much longer and move much more slowly than their pre-COVID counterparts. We think this is probably because most of the staff wandered off and got other jobs when the pandemic stopped travel, and the industry now can’t get them back. We stand in what we think is a queue for a long time, only to find that it isn't, so we have to start again. There are a lot of unhappy people here, and if things don’t improve I’m thinking the staff might soon need the services of the local riot squad. The lady in front of us has already missed her flight with a connection through to India. Another lady gets to the front and checks in her dog. Well that’s what it looks like. They weigh the dog, then feed it, then weigh it again. If there’s a good reason for doing this it’s not immediately obvious. What is obvious however is that it‘s taking up a lot of the attendant’s time, and the natives in the queue are getting more restless by the second.
Several long hours later we finally get some good news; they’ve managed to get us on a direct flight to Quebec, and it’s today. I can’t help but wonder why this wasn’t the automatic option; do airline computers not think that passengers have enough stress in their lives already. I don’t think airline computers are very smart. When a flight we booked last year from Melbourne to Darwin via Adelaide went the way of the dinosaur, Qantas’ computer, in its infinite wisdom, rebooked it as Melbourne to Adelaide, then back to Melbourne again, and from there on to Darwin. Hmmm.
As we wait for our flight a call comes over the PA system. They want to get everyone to board a flight to Grand Prairie (they have some great place-names here - Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, Picture Butte, Lost Horse, Stoner, Climax and Punkeydoodles Corner are a few that quickly come mind; OK I looked the last three up), but it seems they’re having a bit of trouble tracking down a suitably qualified pilot. They then promise to let everyone know when (if?) they manage to find one. Uh huh. Issy says that I mightn’t find this quite so hysterically funny if we were the ones flying to Grand Prairie, wherever that might be.
We land in Quebec City, and it does indeed feel like we’ve just been dropped into the middle of France. We expected the traffic signs to be in both English and French, but nope, only French. We both think it feels a bit odd; a French enclave in the middle of otherwise almost exclusively English speaking North America… Maybe it’ll feel a bit less so after we’ve spent a few days here.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Mystery
You had a weird meeting... we'll see where this goes. Glad the flight worked out.