>The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Travel Day

>Our family New Year’s Resolution is not to travel more than two hours from our house for a very, very long time.  It’s not that we don’t love you, family and friends across the country, it’s that I cannot face another experience like the following until I have plenty of time to forget it.  I have also resolved never, ever again to fly in and out of Toronto (we usually go in and out of Detroit) unless it is our sole destination, for reasons that will become very clear as you read on.

We knew from various reports that it was going to be a long wait at the airport to come home last Thursday, so we got there three and a half hours early.  Usually reports of long waits are exaggerated, so I wasn’t overly concerned.  How wrong I was. 

The first line consisted of checking in bags, which moved more or less quickly and seemed like it would be no problem.  Unfortunately the new “no carry-on bags” rule was difficult to understand, unknown to many of the passengers, and generally caused a lot of frustration and confusion.  We were told we could bring a laptop bag and a diaper bag, so we thought we were all set.  However, we were then told that since our knapsack wasn’t an official laptop bag, it would have to be checked.  Ok, somehow we squished the laptop into the diaper bag, got our bags “checked” (ha) and then continued to wheel them to the next line.

That’s right, I said we continued to wheel the stupid baggage to the next line.  You see, you can’t check any of your luggage at the counter in Toronto if you are flying to the U.S.  You have to walk it around with you until you have cleared customs. 

On to the customs line, which took us about 40 minutes.  By this point we’d been standing in lines for over an hour, and the toddler who’d had a 30-min. nap in the car (as opposed to the 180-min nap he usually takes) was already sick of the whole thing, and we were nowhere near done.  I will save you the tedium of reading about the rest of the ridiculous lines we stood in and summarize them thus:

baggage “check-in” – 35 min.
customs – 40 min.
baggage check in (actually putting them on the conveyor belt)- 10 min.
getting diaper bag checked – 5 min.
security line in which they checked diaper bag again- 25 min.
extended security line in which we were patted down, coat pockets examined, and diaper bag checked twice more – 50 min.

I think I’ve underestimated the times here because it took us over 2.5 hours to get through it all.  I guess we were walking between lines here and there and convincing Sebastian that we were almost done and would get him something to drink any minute.  He did pretty well considering all of this, but we were pretty exhausted and no longer in the mood to entertain him.

But then there was the five-hour flight still to come.  You can see why I already won’t do this again until I have selective amnesia, right?  Because he didn’t sleep for one second until the plane started landing.  That’s right, I said LANDING.  Five hours later. 

I could go into much more detail about the extended security mix-up in which I had to get patted down twice, the turbulence that almost made me throw up during the landing, or the hunt for my missing BlackBerry after I got off the plane and was already at baggage claim (only to discover much later that it was safely zipped into one of my husband’s pockets)…but you are already as sick of this travel story as I was of living through it.

There will come a time when Sebastian can sleep on planes again, or read books, or watch movies (because I will acknowledge that Air Canada has super nice planes with individual screens for each passenger that offer a bunch of movies, TV shows, and music.  Cool.).  However, we won’t be flying with him again until those days have arrived.

It’s nothing personal.  We love you all.  But if you want to see Sebastian’s dance moves in person, you’re going to have to come visit us.