All good things have to end, sadly

After our rather wonderful month in Canada, the time had come to return home. Annoying and unwanted but there it was in the diary - an upcoming flight booking. That had been fun to arrange mind you. Going from Vancouver to Heathrow was wildly expensive (70% more) compared to a flight from Seattle which is under a three hour drive from Vancouver. That isn't explained by a lack of competition on the routes, mainly due to the drop in UK - USA travel in the Trump era it seems.

We'd found a more convenient and way better priced trip though. Westjet from Comox to Calgary, then Calgary to Heathrow with the same airline. The only drawback was a LONG layover in Calgary but so be it.

Getting to Comox from Martin and Inge's house is quite a trek:

Yes, a whole 6 minutes in the car says Mr Google. It actually took more like 5. We had a coffee in the airport and said our sad farewells and several huge thank yous  then boarded the little 737 to Calgary. The misery of heading back was tempered by some wonderful mountain and snow views on the way:

but rather added to when a further 90 minute delay to our connecting flight was announced. Over 8 hours in Calgary airport was not tempting. We did some digging and found the inbound plane that we needed was going to be mega-late:

Over 3 hours late leaving Spain, wonderful. We found a nice enough restaurant to have some lunch in then settled ourselves into the lounge to wait things out. Luckily Westjet decided on a plane swap so we were "only" 90 minutes later than planned boarding the plane. That was a pain though, the lounge closes at a fixed time no matter how many delayed flights there are or people in the place. Flying is such fun.

Luckily the flight and crew were good, we had a rampantly gay Senior cabin crew man who made the most wonderful announcements, often invoking his "poor old Grandma" to encourage us to do what he wanted (like not stealing the blankets - something that hadn't even crossed our little minds). Arriving at Heathrow was a mixed bag - actually they pitched up on the belt very quickly to be fair but then we went into the Costa coffee place to wait for Anne who was kindly giving us a lift to Hythe. Drinking a very average coffee with a seriously over-day pastry at three times the price we had been paying in Canada was a harsh reminder of UK life.

Still, we were chauffeur driven back, unpacked, caught up with the Toddlers and the crew's brother  and happily collapsed into bed that evening to not sleep.

As well as boring things like dentist appointments, we had some fun. We collected Izzy by meeting Anne again at a local hostelry. She had Barney with her too - he belongs to a friend of hers and likes to photobomb whenever possible:

 Back in Hythe, Izzy was treated to a much needed but in her eyes unwanted groom:

At least we could see the eyes now and know when she was planning some badness. We finally headed back to the poor neglected boat but to borrow a line from The Full Monty film "for one night only". The good news was that the heating worked just fine. The bad news was that we needed it.