May 21, 2025
Day 92: Home
I'm glad to report that I am writing now from Canada, but it sort of could have been Beijng. In Frankfort, Condor printed us a boarding pass, and that said we would be leaving from Gate 48. So we trundled down there and took a seat, with maybe an hour to spare before boarding time. We sat patiently for quite a long while, until Dodie happened to notice that the flight leaving at about our scheduled departure time from Gate 48 was going not to Vancouver but Beijing. And yes, the plane parked suspiciously outside the window was from China Airlines! I went up to the gate staff, and they were darn sure they owned this gate and were going to China. "You must have had a gate change" was their obvious conclusion, not that they were abut to offer any further help.
I wandered out into the concourse and stopped a police officer to ask where to find the big screen with all the departures. "No need", he said, "I have it all on my phone". He looked at my boarding pass and he looked at his phone, which showed the flight, but no gate was listed. I carried on and did find the big board. There were so many flights, that despite ours being not that far off, it did not yet fit on the screen. I walked back to B48 and told Dodie my findings. Then I walked back to the big screen, several times, until at last the truth was revealed: B42. Naturally we grabbed up our stuff and hustled down there.
We found the Condor plane very comfortably nestled into B42, calmly imbibing what would turn out to be very low quality pasta and pizza to offer in flight to those who had found the gate.
At gate B42 we did spy the sign below, which told alert China travelers that they were swapping B42 for B48. But there was no sign, email, or announcement for those going to Vancouver!
Seasoned travelers, like we are supposed to be, should be well aware of last minute gate changes. But then, we are the guys who got on the wrong train twice in this tour, getting thrown far off course, and having to claw our way back. Checking is a lot stronger for planes than for trains, but we were still mildly freaked by this. Even if we might not have ended eating Chinese food instead of hamburgers, we could at least have missed the Vancouver flight, save for Dodie's alert spotting!
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We were a little surprised by the low quality of the catering offered on board the Condor flight. They started with a quite low quality pasta dish, without the usual chicken choice, and refrigerated none too fresh bread. There was however a slightly sauerkraut like little bowl of cabbage, that I liked a lot, but also got to eat Dodie's. Two hours before the end of the flight they followed with a little oblong low quality piece of pizza, and that was the total of their offerings. When the lady came around with coffee, I asked for something like a cookie, and was told that I would have to buy - Oreos. We scoffed at this, and dragged the last of our true German pastries out of our food bag. We didn't expect North America to reach out and to try to poison us with something like Oreos, so early in our return.
One thing Condor did have was an entertainment system with a good selection of movies. Unless you are a monk, good at meditation, you do need that, to pass 10 hours of sitting. I watched a fair few. One of these was the newly topical "Conclave", which I found much inferior to the much older "The Shoes of the Fisherman". However the plot twist that both movies share is the election as Pope of a newly arrived total outsider, who will shake up the old order. Maybe this partly became reality with the election of Leo XIV less than two weeks ago.
Another one was the latest bio pic of Bob Dylan, "A Complete Unknown". This had amazingly good renditions of Bob's 1961-65 songs and good portrayals of the characters.
One that Dodie re-watched was "Driving Miss Daisy", a heartwarming but ultimately sad 1989 brilliant performance by Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, and Dan Ackroyd.
In Vancouver, it was a bit disconcerting to be greeted by the now standard passport reading machines, with no human to either say "Welcome Home" or to sadly not say "Welcome Home". And something that we, I suppose, should now be grateful for, being in Canada, no one also seemed to care how long we had been gone, where we had been, and if we were bringing anything back. We just strolled out into the streets of our wonderful country.
Being more of less locals at the Vancouver airport, we sleep walked onto the Skytrain, to the Bridgeport interchange, and onto the 620 bus to the ferry. As seniors we expected to go on the ferry for free, but we were surprised to be informed that this was BC Day, a statutory holiday that meant we would have to pay $40. Oh well.
On the ferry, we took a seat at a table in the cafeteria, so as to swap SIMs on a good surface. Lyca Mobile UK had been busy sending text messages, in which they liked their electronic chops, detailing just how much they hoped to charge should we dare to use our phone with their SIM over here.
By the time we were ready to get some food at the cafeteria, the line stretched way down to the other end of the ship. I came back to our table, and waited one hour, by which time the line was sort of manageable. During this time, we watched people arriving at tables with their burgers and fries and salmon salads. Each would have invested at least $25 in these treats. That seemed very high to us, but then BC Ferries could charge even more, given the length of those lines.
We eventually split an $18 Chicken Pot Pie, which was in fact not bad. We do, of course, remember chicken pot pie as a budget meal choice from our early days, now of course long gone.
Erika picked us up at the terminal, in her spiffy electric car. In our now dazed and sleep deprived state, it was a pleasure to sit beside the intelligent and alert Erika, even if the conversation included difficult personal events, not to mention current politics. So many times Erika or Marvin have collected our sorry remains from the ferry or airport! Amazingly, they have done it with tremendous and comforting good will. Such great friends.
Now that we have had sort of two nights' sleep, we are ready to tackle chores around the farm - cutting tall grass, planting cover crops, repairing tractors. Yet we realize it will soon be time to plan the next plane and hotel reservations, and to head back to Leipzig. We are eager to see how that repair shop will have made out with our brakes!
Stay tuned, for further statistics and comments on this trip, not to mention the plans for the next one.
And look, that's a Rufous Hummingbird out my window. There are only two species of Hummingbird here on Vancouver Island, the resident Anna's and the Rufous, that comes only in Spring.
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No further mentions from the good folks at CB, either. Maybe I really am not meant to write but read everyone else’s and make my silly comments.
Tot Ziens from Bossche Ballen town where I did not make the trek to eat it!
3 weeks ago
Went to My Cycleblaze
That offers a "Create Journal" button
Got a screen that asks for a title, a start date and optional end date, a single word that will be used as an id for the journal
Then you get s choice of "Edit Settings" and "Create Item"
You want to "Create Item" - then you can title a post, write something, and save it, but not for the public yet
Then if you can see how to view your journal, select "edit"
This allows you to edit a previous post of "create" a new one
But first choose "edit settings" and select "visible to the public"
You should then be rolling with the ability to "edit" the journal and so to make new entries.
When you "save" or "save and keep editing" a post, click "visible to the public" when you are ready to have it really published.
Go through and let me know where you are at when you run into the glitch that is keeping you from success!
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2 weeks ago
I'm interested to know the basics of your strategy for planning your flights across the Atlantic. e.g. Where do you look online, how far out do you book and pay, airlines you favour or don't, always out of YVR, or sometimes SEA, etc.? You've done it so many times, and plan to continue doing it, so I thought I'd ask, as we look at options.
(I have not read all of your many hundreds of thousand of words, so perhaps you've addressed this somewhere, and if so please point me to it.)
Thanks,
Mark (in Abbotsford)
2 weeks ago
The airlines are so capricious about how much they charge, that I always check our past couple of blogs to see how much a flight to Europe "should" cost. And I begin by telling them it's one traveller, because they so blithely quote prices that could easily be for "each" rather than two. i.e is $1000 a price for us both or just for one?
Not relevant for you, but we always check the price from/to Victoria to see if it might be cheap enough to cut out the ferry ride for us. Sometimes it is, sometimes not. Again, no logic or fairness in air tickets.
In the old old days, we would see lots cheaper prices out of SEA, enough to make it worthwhile to go visit our daughter in Seattle and then take a shuttle (or make her drive) to SeaTac. But now, we won't set foot in the U.S., not even with a daughter there.
We will try our best to stay away from Charles de Gaulle (CDG) as a transfer point. The place is so big and convoluted, that you need to budget hours and hours to be assured of reaching a new gate. If pushed, we will go to a hotel in Roissy and carry on to a final destination the next day.
We felt ripped off by TAP Air Portugal, especially for the bicycle charge. But for flying to Portugal it is often not possible to avoid them.
On a long flight you can go crazy without a good entertainment system in the seat back. We have never made this a make or break criterion, but are always so grateful when we find it. Westjet to Europe seems good, but Westjet to Costa Rica used an old rattletrap plane. We used to like Air Transat, especially because they would supply a plastic bag option for the bikes, but somehow lately they have fallen off our radar.
We are now absolutely avoiding taking full sized bikes onto planes. So much hassle and some airlines have crazy rates for carrying them. We are even planning for the next time to take the Bike Fridays one last time, to Yucatan, and to store them there, despite the monthly cost of at least $50.
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