Eventful travel day

  Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
Monday, June 16, 2008

Thunderstorms in Chicago put a crimp in our travel plans before we got off the ground in San Diego.  All flights to Chicago were unable to take off until the thunderstorms let up.  Our pilot said he had no idea when we would be cleared to fly, but he would pull up to the runway, shut off the engines and wait.  That made us nervous because we'd heard horror stories of people stuck on a plane for 8 hours on the tarmac.  As luck would have it, only 8 minutes later, we took off. Fortunately we "made up time in the air"  --however that works.  And we arrived on time to Chicago.  Unfortunately, everything going out of Chicago was either delayed or canceled.  Luckily, our flight to Buffalo was only delayed 30 minutes, unlike many other miserable people with canceled flights that we saw waiting in the longest customer service line ever!

After upgrading our compact rental car (what was I thinking?) to a mid-size Volvo--which barely fit our suitcases and 3 kids, we finally left the airport at 5:30.  Not knowing that there were three bridges to Canada, we ended up at the farthest one from Niagara Falls.  Customs into Canada took 30 minutes, and the drive back to Niagara took another 30, so by the time we got to the falls it was 7:00pm. It was absolutely beautiful and the light was just right, so we were very glad we had taken the time to stop. We had some pizza and left by 8:00, calling my Dad on the cell phone to tell him to let Aunt Donna know we'd be 3 hours late.  Unbeknownst to us, our cell phone provider does not have coverage in Canada, so that was our last phone call for a while, since it had bounced off a cell tower in New York.
As we headed toward Toronto, we saw that thunderstoms were afoot there, too.  Surprisingly, there was a ton of traffic, which we had not expected on a Sunday night.  Between the pouring rain and stop-and-go traffic, we considered getting a hotel and trying again in the morning.

Fortunately the rain stopped just as the traffic cleared as we got east of Toronto.  We got off the freeways in Pontypool and realized that our mapquest directions were useless because there were no streetsigns on these little country roads.  However, the mileage included in the mapquest directions was our saving grace.  With just a little backtracking, we managed to find it and arrive by 11pm--just in time to catch the last 6 minutes of the Celtics/Laker playoff game.  (Lakers won!)