Part Three: Boarding Time.

Coming home to Canada was definitely worth every penny, every tear and every bit of sleepless stressed out flight minutes home. But the story of the wedding and how beautiful it was is a story for another day. For now we will continue with the endless saga of woe.

In Calgary, I notified the embassy of the theiving travel agent who had in fact abandoned shop and hit the highway. His shop in Bangkok is now a backpacking store. I applied for a Thai work visa, I met friends, and I received a very generous donation of two boxes of books for my school in Umphium, which made my bags coming back to Bangkok even more monstrous than they had ever been before. Both of them weighed over eighty pounds. In Calgary, I also bought another one-way ticket back to Bangkok. This time I was with China Eastern Airlines, going through Shanghai. Last minute, non-refundable, no changes permissible. "You better catch that flight," I thought to myself.

Before flying out of Vancouver to return to work, I visited a friend on Vancouver Island, a one and a half hour ferry ride from Vancouver. I left my bags in the airport and I spent the afternoon with her out at a lake, swimming and basking in the sun and losing my glasses in the bottom of the lake.

Luckily, I had contacts with me and an extra pair of glasses somewhere in my monstrous bags.

"I should be on the eight o'clock ferry," I thought. "Or probably the nine o'clock." But we made our travel plans late at night when both me and my friend who would be driving me were feeling tired, so we settled on the ten o'clock ferry.

We arrived at the ferry terminal at nine fifty-five. "One ticket, please," I said, panting a little from the run in from the car.

"Sorry," the woman at the counter said. "We don't start selling tickets for another ten minutes." I looked blank. "We don't start selling tickets for the eleven o'clock ferry until after ten o'clock."

I panicked but there was nothing to be done. The gangway between shore and boat was already going up. We had missed the ferry. I sat with my friend in the terminal. If I missed this flight, that was it. No changes, no rescheduling, no refund. Just ANOTHER ticket I would have to swallow and buy again. We called the airline, only to get a chirpy recording telling me that there were no changes and the flight was on time. We made calculations. I could still make it, if the ferry was on time (they often aren't) and if there was no traffic and if security wasn't taking a long time…

It was a long hour to wait for the ferry. I ate chocolate like a madwoman. It was a long hour and a half on the ferry. It was a long half hour ride to the airport.

I tore out of the bus and raced through the airport down to the baggage check where I had left the monster bags. I loaded them precariously onto a trolley and then barreled my way through two terminals to get to my check in counter, resisting the urge to swear at old ladies and slow movers and almost toppling a family of five.

Covered in sweat, I pulled up ahead of the China Eastern counter and found my ticket. I looked up to see a big sign:

Typhoon in Shanghai. Flights Delayed.