Wow that was a long long day. Our flight was unfortunately delayed  so we had to stay in the lounge longer than originally planned (yeah I know, boo hoo all that free food and drink). It was about an hour and twenty mins before the gate finally appeared so we trundled as fast as we could and then had to wait until someone could escort us the 30 yds to the aircraft door. This is always the stressful bit where Amanda goes to the seat and leaves me to sort out the wheelchair. I folded it up and put it in the bag and put in the hands of the airport staff (gulp) and hoped that we’d see at the other end.

The flight was pretty good and we made up some time so we ended up landing only about 30 mins after we were meant to. As this is a special occasion we bought Club World tickets. This entitles you to Fast Track security clearance, priority boarding and priority tags on the wheelchair so in theory it should be there post haste when we disembark, Actually in this case it meant….oops the Fast Track security was shut so queue up with everyone else. Ooops the flight was delayed so everyone went together to the gate and boarded at the same time. This is great when you’re trying to fold up a wheelchair and package it up with a line of people behind you. You can feel their stares in the back of  your head as you hold them up. Then of course we have to be last off the plane as we have to wait for them to return the wheelchair to the air craft door. Thirty minutes. That’s how long we had to wait before it appeared. So we make our way through an empty airport to get to immigration. Here, someone spotted us and we actually jump a massive queue and get to the front, making up the time we spent waiting for the wheelchair. We get called to the immigration officer and she sends us back because we hadn’t used the fancy electronic terminal to scan our passports first. Back we go. The terminal is too tall to take Amanda’s photo and and for some reason I had to squat down for it to take mine, not brilliantly designed, unless I missed something blindingly obvious (not beyond the realms of possibility to be fair). We returned to the front of the line and get called again by the same officer. I swear if looks could kill we’d be dead but you know what? Screw ’em. If they want to swap, I’m sure Amanda would do it in a heartbeat. Suck it up buttercup and be grateful you’re able to stand in a line for a while.

Finally, we’re officially in Canada 🇨🇦  yay. Let’s go get our car. We find Budget quite easily and we complicate matters by asking about winter tyres. So, we’re driving to Whistler, we tell the young man, and I saw that we’re required to have winter tyres from 1st October onwards to drive that road. “Oh you want winter tyres?” he says. The he proceeds to tell us that locals drive on regular tyres and if they get stopped by police and turned around, they go and get a coffee somewhere wait about 30 mins or and hour then try again, hopefully the police will have moved on. Ummmmm. No. We’d like winter tyres. He locates an SUV with winter tyres yay. C$20 per day extra…boooo. Then the entire system goes down because of some updates done back east so he has to WRITE IT OUT. ON A FORM. LIKE WRITE, USING A PEN. I was worried he might ask me to write it for him but we got there in the end.

The drive to the motel was interesting. The sat nav wasn’t updating fast enough so we missed at least two turnings and ended up going behind the motel through a really sketchy area with abandoned cars and boarded up buildings but we survived. The room was clean and really comfortable. We finally got to bed at 10:45pm. At this point we’d been up about 22 hours I think. Body clocks being the pain in the arse that they are we both woke up after sleeping for about 2 hours or so. I managed to get back to sleep for a few more hours but Amanda didn’t. Breakfast was a nice surprise as I didn’t realise it was included.  We ate and we left.

When in another country it’s always wise to stick to speed limits. We noticed this is a good rule of thumb today as we had a long line of traffic behind us most of the way but then passed at least one of them after they passed us at speed but now getting a ticket from the police. The cops over here hide in bushes with their speed guns or just behind road signs, the sneaky things. People in the U.K. moan about speed cameras when they’re signposted. They’d riot if they had to put up with this.

This is a really long way to say we didn’t do much today other than drive to Whistler, check in, drink a beer, eat some food, go for a short walk and now crashing in front of the tv considering ordering room service later before we hopefully catch up on some zzzz’s.

Tomorrow we plan on exploring a little so I’ll update then.

Special fun fact*

Canadian beavers shed their tails each winter and grow a new one in the spring. These tails are collected, dried and finally deep fried, topped with delicious things like cinnamon, Nutella or just sugar and sold as a sweet treat. You’ll see Beaver Tails for sale all over Canada.

*May or may not be true