Back in France after a not great end to a brilliant holiday in Canada. You'll recall the bad start we got off to, well, end not much better. Trip from downtown Toronto to airport a breeze, subway to end of the line (Kipling) then the '192 Airport Rocket' (love the name) to the airport ($3.00). There in plenty of time,3 hours before flight, so checked in old fashioned way. On doing so weren't allocated seat numbers, man at desk said that this wasn't a problem as, as soon as we saw someone at the departure gate we should approach them and our seats would be allocated. After messing about on their 'free to use ipads for everyone' at our gate eventually someone appeared, Pauline went up to get seat numbers along with some fellow travellers but was told an announcement would be made and sure enough it was: "Passengers with GTE on their tickets (around 20+ of us it seemed) would be called up by their 'family' name." Now when people with names beginning with R then W then P were being called I knew they were not doing it alphabetically so patience was required but that soon ran out! They started to load the plane, Zone 1,Zone 2, while calling out 'family names' in between times...but not ours! When ours wasn't called as the last lot were being loaded we went up to the desk to be told that they had 'oversold' the flight and we were apparently the people to be 'bumped' from the flight. There was one seat if one of us wanted to go alone!!!!.They did offer us $800.00 each if we would wait and go via Frankfurt or London but by now we just wanted to get home.While remaining calm and letting them know we were unhappy with this they had asked as to confirm what our luggage looked like,so as not to put it on the plane without us. Then things took a turn, apparently another passenger had a problem with his passport or something so he couldn't fly so they could take us...at this point I asked them to make sure our bags were back on..."don't worry that's already happening" we were told. Anyway guess what?...one of our bags failed to arrive apparently it wanted more time in Toronto! Still,we weren't as bad as the young honeymoon couple who only had the new wife's bag and were only in Paris for one night before heading to Turkey...good luck with that!
Maybe we should have taken the money...incidentally one of our previous guests from Le Bourg we had met up with in Canada had asked us who we were flying with and when we told him Air Canada he informed us glibly that their motto is 'We aren't happy until you're unhappy' mmm.
Not a great end to the trip (TGV from Paris also 30 minute) late but being picked up at the train station by friends Mike and Liz and then giving a lovely meal made all the difference -good to be back.
