Another week, another story. On my way home last night and I knew it wasn't going to be good as the plane was delayed "55 minutes" and it was still 1.5 hours before we were supposed to take off. Not a big deal, I just had a burger and a couple of glasses of Guinness, I can blow an hour easily enough. Time to go only to find out that the 55 turned to 95 ... oh, it is going to be one of THOSE days. This is the Air Canada flight direct from Calgary to London, ON, and I take this flight mostly to get home at a reasonable time, the cheaper (in every way) Westjet flight leaves two hours after this which gets in about 11:30pm ... a tad late for me as then I don't get to see any kids before bed. Oh well, weather is weather, not much we can do about that delay and at least we did get on the plane without another posted delay. But that was just the start.

We had to wait for a passenger, why we have to wait when we are already late I don't know but wait we did ... tick, tick, tick, another 10 minutes but ah ha, there he is.

"Good evening folks, this is your Captain speaking. We picked up a bit of ice on the landing in Calgary so we are just going to taxi over to the de-icer, perhaps another 15 minutes and then we are outta here. Sorry for the delay...." blah blah blah. Nobody wants to fly an unsafe plane and ice on the wings is definitely unsafe so no problem I guess. But of course there is somebody in front of us so we sit and watch Tick, tick, tick, another 20 minutes.

"Is there a doctor on board?" ... you've got to be kidding me, but nobody is laughing. Somebody needs medical attention, please have a doctor on board, PLEASE! But no such luck, back to the terminal we go...tick, tick, tick. They bring a doctor on board and spend 10 minutes convincing themselves to take the passenger off, "we wouldn't want to get diverted to Chicago in flight", says the Captain. No we would not want that, tick, tick, tick.

We've burned "300 kg of fuel" taxiing around the airport and of course the sickie has checked baggage that has to be removed...tick, tick, tick. I was seriously worried that we would have passed some magic timeline making it impossible for the pilots to fly but no we did finally push back again and started on our way. Enough time had elapsed in the plane that I had watched 3/4 of The Fighter (a better movie then I expected) and AC bought the first round.

The extended time in the plane, along with the free booze, seemed to have taken a toll on many passengers bladders. There was a line up to use the toilet 6 people deep for more than 1/2 the flight! but thankfully we did make it home without further incident landing at 12:35am, more than 3 hours late and certainly well beyond bed time for my kids ... but home, safe and sound just the same. Only 1 week left of this grueling travel, I certainly do recall why I hate flying ... but at least the airports are relatively small and they are domestic flights, it could be a lot worse, I could be traveling with Peter Near!