Travel in 2018

May KakaoTalked me at 5:47am, so I turned off the alarm I'd set for 6:00 and slowly began to prepare for Jay to pick me up at 7:00. When he arrived and we were just about to leave, I realized I'd out-thought myself as usual by packing my house key in a place so safe I couldn't remember where it was. Jay hadn't brought his, thinking we'd use mine of course, so I had to search for a spare. I found the one Okanagan Restoration had used, and we left with the house locked and us laughing at how much smoother things go when I don't have time to overthink them, which as a single, retired person I always do. So the only confusion in my life is self inflicted. We had a good talk on the drive, and now I'm in the airport with time to burn.

Unlike my travelling companions, I had an uneventful, if at times uncomfortable, trip and am now spread out on clean sheets, after a long hot bath, in the airport hotel in Malaga. But, according to the Carolyn Baughan rule of travel, they will have the last laugh because they will eat for free off their stories for years while my tales won't get me a kids' meal at MacDonald's.
Pollock's flight was cancelled because of an ice storm in Ottawa so they had to take the train to Montreal where they finally got a flight but the take off was delayed for de-icing. They will finally get here after midnight. But Mela and Don's tale if well told will merit the real gourmet meals. They won't arrive until tomorrow some time because London City Airport was completely closed down today because a WW2 bomb was discovered and had to be dismantled. Can you believe it? In this era of fear mongering, Trump, Kim Jung Eun and ISIS their trip is held up by a remnant of WW2. They couldn't get a flight until tomorrow morning out of Gatwick.

I am now starving. Even in a crummy airport hotel you can't get dinner in Spain until after seven. It is that now so I can finally get something hot to eat.







Flying this morning in a turbo prop over the mountains between Vernon and Vancouver. This plane and WW2 bombs in London City Airport make it hard to believe it's really 2018.

I do have one story that might merit a glass of wine and a couple of small hors d'oeuvres. The plan to use my bad knee as an excuse to take advantage of the handicap services at the Paris airport so that I'd be able to make the quick connection to the plane to Malaga not only worked but also presented a few characters and incidents worth recounting. My fellow travellers were quite a few very old East Indians, a black man with a serious limp and his wife and a French woman from Nice who , like me, was of a certain age but with no discernible handicap. We all arrived at the mustering point in individual wheelchairs pushed quickly by young men who appeared to originate from Arab countries for whom pushing wheelchairs was an inconvenient interruption of their animated conversations. The real treat was the man who drove us to our various destinations. He cajoled everyone he encountered into acknowledging his presence. He even got an old East Indian woman to laugh. She had appeared to be very concerned and approached everyone with loud indecipherable comments to no avail until he arrived and responded to her in even louder and less understandable gibberish. He got her laughing. Even her husband, who had been sitting quietly letting her panic run its usual course, smiled in relief. This chauffeur's driving was as fast and erratic as his talking, so after practically having an accident with a baggage vehicle as we sped around the tarmac behind the airport, the others with minor handicaps and I opted to walk the short distance to our gates rather than wait at the door to be whipped there by more young men who considered us to be mere impediments to the flow of their conversation. I caught the flight to Malaga where I am now awaiting the arrival of my friends.