Taipei to Vancouver to Calgary to Saskatoon

 

I had a beer at the airport, then found my gate.  We were a bit late boarding and I don’t know why I didn’t have a zone so I just got in the line up with zone 1.  When I got to the front I was told I was at the wrong gate.  The flight that was boarding was not China Airlines but something that started with an E (and not Emirates) that I have never heard of.  One of the women looked my flight number up and told me my plane was leaving from Gate D2 which “is very far away!”  I asked her to call them, to tell them I was coming and away I went.  I put my stuff in a push cart and ran.  I rechecked the big monitors and my flight was not listed and I had incorrectly presumed there could only be one flight leaving Taipei for Vancouver at 11:55 pm.  By this time almost all flights had left so there were no airport employees around or other travellers.  

The signs weren’t clear at one point and I ended up going downstairs to a dead end.  Eventually I could see D2 at the far end of the concourse so I kept running.  It too was a downstairs departure and when I got to the top of the stairs, the room below was still full.  They were delayed!  I was so happy!  I could hardly breath as my mouth was filled with a thick phlegm that I couldn’t get rid of.  I felt like I was choking.  I drank some water and gradually my mouth returned to normal and soon we were boarding.

The flight was 10.5 hours and I managed to sleep 3-4 hours.  We landed late in Vancouver and I had to go out of the airport and go through security again but made my connecting flight to Calgary in plenty of time-

I spent 5 hours in the Calgary Airport - visited with a woman from Edmonton, made coffee, and relaxed in a comfortable chair with no one around.  What a cool piano-

At 5 I made my way to my gate which was about 18 minutes away!  The airport is gigantic.  It was very weird because we were departing from an addition to the airport- tin walls and bare cement floor.  There were a few of us sitting along the wall and the worker used the loudspeaker to talk to us.  There were only 9 of us on the flight so if everyone was ready, she would check our boarding passes and walk us herself to the plane.  She was making a really big deal out of having to do this.  It seemed pretty simple to me but it was almost putting her over the edge.  All 9 of us boarded the 80 passenger plane.  After getting de-iced, which seemed to take forever, we were in the air-

Once in Saskatoon I tried to get an Uber to take me to Mom and Dad’s and it would have cost me $130!  Bizarre!  I took a cab instead.

And that’s the end of my 2025 Southeast Asia trip!  It was awesome!