Trip and Arrival

Definitely one of the longest days of our lives.  We got up at 3:30 in the morning in Saskatoon to get to the airport.  The taxi driver had a "hernia" issue so was unable to help at all with the bags.  Saskatoon went smoothly and the flight to Toronto was fine.  Toronto became another story altogether.

We were scheduled to have a 4 hour wait in Toronto which is fine since we had to grab all our 10 bags and check them through US Customs which took a little while.  By the time we got through, we had about 2.5 hours to wait.  Just before boarding time, we got the news that there was a little problem with the fuel line in the one engine, so they delayed us an hour and moved us to another gate.  Everybody got up and walked across the entire terminal to the other gate, only to arrive in time for them to announce that they were going to fix the first plane, and delay us another hour.  Everybody was very happy of course to hear that news and the whole army of us walked all the way back to the original gate.

Eventually, we boarded the plane about 2.5 hours later than we were supposed to which of course made our time in Miami a lot tighter than it was planned to be.  For those who haven't been to miami airport, flights from Canada are about six million miles away from the gates for South American flights.  It was a good half hour walk to our new gate with all the information and people movers shut down for the night.

We got on the plane finally and made the very uncomfortable to sleep on trip to La Paz, where we quickly figured out what altitude sickness feels like with all three kids getting sick, and the adults not feeling well either.  We also figured out luckily that our bags were scheduled to stop in La Paz and not continue to Santa Cruz.  They apparently always have pursers on the planes to South America and he was very helpful in getting our bags back on the plane to Santa Cruz.

Either way, we all ended up arriving with all our bags intact.