We go home today (sob!). I'm always sad when vacations end (I have to go back to work - sob!) but I actually do miss home. I miss my own bed - I miss having my own room and not having to share a bathroom (though the last two nights of just sharing with Raymond hasn't been too bad) and I miss my puppy. I got my puppy three weeks before we left on vacation. Yes, that wasn't smart - but he was so cute and I missed my Bento (God rest his soul, he passed away on July 26th of this year at 11 years of age) so much that I needed a puppy. See?
Isn't he adorable? I missed him a lot, so even though I was sad our vacation was ending, I was happy to see my baby.
Raymond and I wake up and trudge our way down to the lounge to have breakfast. Instead of their baked omelet dish, they had hot oatmeal, but plenty of carbs and croissants and other deliciousness available. We fueled up knowing that we were going to spend the day traveling. He was flying back to Hong Kong while I was a weenie and just flying home to LA. But since airlines no longer feed us I knew I had to eat breakfast (not that you had to force me to eat. Please). So we stuffed out faces because that's how we roll. Then we went back to our rooms to finish up.
Um....we had a lot of luggage. A lot. We weren't going to fit into a taxi - so Raymond called the front desk and asked if they could call for a van taxi for us - and they did. Yay for service! We had a cool taxi driver - he lived in Hong Kong for about a decade so he could speak Cantonese (though we speak Mandarin, though we both speak the language of dim sum - which to me is the most important part of Cantonese) AND he lived in LA for a few years as well...so he knew our teeny tiny hometown! We even talked about restaurants and places we like. It was probably the most entertaining taxi ride we've ever had...the world is indeed a small, small place.
Because we're taking different airlines to different places, we say goodbye to Raymond and drop him off first. Then we go to the Air Canada hub and check in. Where are the people? It's all machines now! We had to find someone to come and check in our luggage for us since they wanted to charge us. Alas, as my parents are premier gold, they can't! But we had to get a live body to come over and waive the fee and print out the tags for us. Check in was easy. What was a pain in the butt? Going through immigration. OMG. Once again, there are no longer people, but machines. Which would be great and fast, except they pull random people to go and talk to the ICE people (all 3 of them, sitting there sipping their coffees with the most bored expression on their faces) in their little kiosks. What sucked? My dad got picked while my mom and I were cleared, but since we were all together, we all got in line (didn't want dad to feel abandoned) and shuffled our way through. I thought it would be fast, but the guy kept asking us questions - where we went, what we bought, how much we spent, what I did for a living, why we were away from home for two and a half weeks. Blah blah blah. What I really wanted to do was ask him if we looked like terrorists or people smuggling small children, but I had enough sense to restrain myself because I know the bored looking rotund man had the ability to order a cavity search and keep me from going home. That would be no bueno, so I kept my mouth shut, smiled my cheesiest smile at him and he eventually waved us away.
Finally! We were through. Because my parents are gold card members, we got into Air Canada's lounge and we partook of their wifi, delicious coffees as well as assorted snacks (I also very much appreciated their spacious and super clean bathrooms). We had about an hour until boarding, so we chilled on comfortable club chairs and each played on our phones/tablets and ate our heads off.
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| This is how we roll - we play on our phones. All the time. |
We then shuffled onto our flight to San Francisco where we were going to catch another 50 minute flight home. We had originally booked a straight shot from Vancouver to LAX in the early afternoon, but in their typically dastardly underhanded moves, the airline decided to change the flight schedule so our 2 pm flight ended up leaving at 8 pm instead. Uh...what the hell are we going to do all that time? I'm not for wandering around the street like hobos for hours while lugging around my crap (see our Paris trip - sob!), so we ended up switching our flightr to a much better time even though it meant that there was going to be a layover.
Can I just say, Air Canada's economy class sucks donkey balls. We are not tall people. I'm 5'2" with short legs, my mom is 5'3" with slightly longer legs. My dad is 5'8" and his legs aren't very long either. We come from a short people (with the exception of Yao Ming, who is a freak of Chinese nature. We don't grow them that tall) and we felt super squashed. Maybe I should have looked around for a tall guy and taken a photo of him smushed into the seat with his knees around his ears, but I didn't want to seem all creepy stalkery. So all I have to illustrate the sardine can sized plan are photos of our very short legs.
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| look how squashed this is! Ahhhh! |
Alas, our flight ended up being late. We had about an hour and a half layover at San Francisco which ended up being pretty much all gone by the time we got off our Air Canada flight. We literally ran off the plane and booked it half way across the freaking airport just to make it in time to board our next flight. Whew!
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| Crappy crooked out of focus shot taken while power walking through the airport. |
We made it onto our flight and finally relaxed. Look how happy my dad is! And fortunately, because it's a United Airlines flight and we get upgraded to economy plus for free, we were MUCH more comfortable in our new seats for our very long 50 minute flight back to LA.
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| dad happy about the leg room. And about making the flight. |
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| look how roomy this is: you can't even see my knees! |
Because there was nothing else to do, and also because I finally had a window seat, I was fascinated by all the planes lined up to take off.
So yes, got a little enthusiastic taking photos of the sky, and the water, and the random houses and mountains. But I also (if you have a microscope) snapped a super bad photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. Which is neither golden nor did it have a gate that I could see.
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| if you look really, really, really hard, you could sort of kind of see the Golden Gate Bridge |
After the super short flight (btw, United has the cutest airline safety video now - way more entertaining and way less awkward than a very uncomfortable flight attendant showing you how to buckle your seat belt and waving at the exits from 2 feet away when you're not paying attention at all) we were home! Yay for crappy LAX!
Except...we did not get our luggage. We waited, and waited and waited, and our suitcases did NOT come down the conveyor belt. Thankfully we saved our luggage check in stubs and we hustled our way over to the overwhelmed lady working the counter. She clicked around on her computer and sighed, then talked smack about the Canadians as well as the morons (her words) who worked at SFO, because they put our luggage on the flight AFTER ours. And we were not the only ones whose luggage didn't make it - there were about 4 other parties on our flight whose luggage was also on the next flight. We opted to wait an hour and a half instead of driving the hour back to LAX the next day (or waiting a week for their slow asses to deliver my pajamas). We grabbed some seats (which we were lucky to get because the baggage place filled up and people ended up sitting on the ground) and my mom had to call and placate our poor driver who was waiting for us. Poor guy ended up waiting in his van for all that time (we made sure to tip him well) instead of leaving us behind. So for the next hour and a half we just sat there, playing on our phones (again) and since I'm a snack hoarder, we ate random crackers, macarons, and cake I had stuffed inside my backpack - which was fortunate because we were starving by then. Our baggage finally came out and we finally got into the van waiting for us and we finally made our way home. Ahhhh.
Thus ended our two week trip. We saw things we wanted to see, things we hoped to see, and things we never thought we'd see. We had two weeks of quality time with family (something not easily obtained these days) and with friends. We spent days in the boonies with no TV, no radio, no hairdryer (sob!), no Target (double sob) and ate some seriously bad pho we thank the good Lord we didn't get explosive diarrhea and food poisoning from. We saw some seriously awesome natural phenomena, some beautiful unspoiled nature, and land and water and animals as God created. All in all, this was a crazy successful trip, one we will remember for years to come.
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