Canada “Take off, eh”

Today we cruised into Vancouver harbor. Since Radiance of the Seas is a small cruise ship, we went under the Lionsgate Bridge. I literally ran up to the pool deck to watch! We cleared it by 15 feet!

We docked at the Canada Place cruise terminal. 

We had to be out of our cabin by 8, but our disembark time was 9:30 so we ate breakfast in the buffet. Then we went to our departure area to wait. Finally at 9:45, they called our number and we got off the ship. 

I had booked airport transfers through Royal Caribbean and that worked really well. It was a 30- minute bus ride to YVR Airport.

Unfortunately after that, nothing went well. We had to move our morning toiletries from our carry-on to our checked bags. Unfortunately I missed a small bag of them. (More about that later.) The American Airlines baggage check in was a disorganized mess. We were directed to stand in one of two lines, but the agent working our line walked away, and the other agent ignored the people our line! We literally stood there for 20 minutes until the agent returned! Sean was pretty mad and so was I by the time we got to the counter, Fortunately both of our bags were under 50 lbs. We also failed to notice that the TSA-Precheck didn’t print on his boarding pass. We walked through the LONG security line, and he was kicked out and told to go back through the regular security line! I went through the PreCheck line, and of course they wanted to check the contents of my bag and took most of the stuff out. (There was a woman with an infant in front of me, and they dragged out all of her baby’s milk bottles and her diaper bag.) Over on Sean’s side, the agent dumped out my toiletries because it wasn’t in their “special baggie” which US airports stopped doing years ago. They also gave Sean a hard time about his CPAP machine and took it out of the case. By the time we met up after passport control, we were both pretty pissed off. We ate lunch and then waited at our gate. We had booked the window and aisle seats and left the center seat open. The very last person who walked on the plane took the empty center seat. Oh well. At least we were on our way home!

We flew right by Mount Rainier on our departure. 

Fortunately once we got to DFW things went smoothly again. We got our bags, and took the shuttle to Express Parking. We parked for FREE thanks to Sean’s Disabled Veteran license plate! At 9:15 PM, we finally made it home. The cats were very happy to see us! 

Tomorrow will be a day to catch up on laundry and unpack. It was really a great trip!