Home!

I arrived home yesterday evening at about 6:30pm EST after a long day of traveling.

I got started a bit late yesterday morning and so I took a taxi to the airport instead of the public transit. The roads were icy and slushy and the driver took it slowly and carefully and got me safely to the airport. Slow and careful is just about unheard of for a taxi driver! Between that and the fact that the conditions were so bad, I gave him a ginormous tip. He deserved it.

My trip home had two parts: the flight to Calgary and then to Kitchener, with a two-hour layover in Calgary. The flight to Calgary was uneventful and smooth. The only thing I didn't like was that someone near me reeked of alcohol; the kind where it's oozing out the pores because the person drank for hours the night before. The smell was so gross. It shames me to think that I smelled like that when I was drinking. I must have reeked, some days. Thankfully those days are long past me now.

The flight to Kitchener had several small children aboard. A remarkably well-behaved three-year-old sat  directly behind me with her awesome mother (who was holding her small infant through the flight) beside her. The mother held her smaller, infant daughter through the whole flight and you wouldn't have known that there was an infant there if you hadn't seen her. The mother was patient when explaining things to her daughter and generally really nice, even when I asked the daughter to please be gentle when using the tray on the back of my seat.

One row back on the other side of the plane was a young mother with her screaming child. The girl had a screaming, crying temper tantrum in the airport whenever her mother didn't let her go where she wanted. Unsurprisingly, she continued to scream and cry during the flight in part because she was under two years old and was held her in mother's arms instead of having her own seat. I'm sure she would have howled through the flight even if she had her own seat, though. Funnily enough, the nice mother offered to give this demon child's mother a hand getting off the plane - even though she had two of her own!

Ian was there to pick me up at the airport and drove me home. We had a wonderful evening just being together watching tv and hanging out. I miss everyone in Edmonton already but it's good to be home.