Christmas with New Family

After a long break, another post appears...

Susan and I are happy to announce that we were engaged on December 21st. The wedding will be in late summer of 2008 in Ontario.

We have just returned from Newfoundland where we spent our Christmas with the Banfields.

We were greeted at the airport in St. John's by a welcome party made up of Susan's: father, sister, brother, 2 aunts, an uncle and 3 cousins. During the next week I met several other members of the family.

We spent time with family and friends and had a great time in Grand Falls.

Our trip home was a bit rough. We were scheduled to leave St. John's at 5am on Dec. 30. Our flight was delayed and then cancelled due to bad weather (oddly enough every other flight leaving around that time took off). The flight was eventually rescheduled for 4:15 that afternoon. After napping and grabbing lunch at Jungle Jims, we returned to the airport and checked in around 2pm. However, our flight did not leave at 4:15. It was discovered a little before we were scheduled to begin boarding that the plane at a mechanical problem and that the flight would be delayed until a mechanic could look at it. After replacing the dead batteries, the plane powered up and they boarded us at least an hour late. We were further delayed while we taxied to another part of the airport for de-icing, and then to our runway. Were were nearly 2 hours late leaving. This made our connection in Toronto VERY tight...so tight that when we got to the gate, we discovered that our seats had been given away. The agents at the gate were very rude (they seemed to think that it was our personal fault that our flight was late), but they did get us seats on the plane. We were moved from row 19 to row 29, which of course meant that we could not recline our seats because were in the last row and had a bulkhead behind us. Obviously it didn't matter that we had paid extra to select our seats in advance back in September when we booked our flights. We did make it home though, and our baggage, which was not transfered to our plane in Toronto, is expected to catch up with us today.

I haven't flown with Air Canada much, prefering to travel with West Jet, and the amount of complications on this trip as well as the poor customer service has definately convinced me to stick with West Jet. Hopefully the next time Air Canada runs out of money the government won't waste their time (and our tax dollars) bailing them out.

I will be sure to post further information regarding the wedding as details are established.

For anyone living in the area between Pickering and the Niagara region, if you attend an Army corps (or other church for that matter), we'd appreciate some pictures of sanctuaries as we are trying to figure out where to have the wedding. You can e-mail me at listowel1984@gmail.com