Holiday Travel Will Always Suck
Holiday Travel Will Always Suck
And it's nobody's fault.
Like most people living South of Bloor, I’m not from here. Neither is my partner. So travelling to see family is often complicated. It got less so when we moved to Toronto, and both of our parents moved to Southern Ontario. But still annoying enough that we’re not travelling on Christmas this year.
It’s not that we’ve gone all Grinch-y or anything. We’re doing two Christmases, just not on December 25th. My general rule about travel is I try to zig while other people are zagging. We don’t have kids, so our life isn’t as regimented as most. If we don’t have to jam into Union (or the airport), why bother?
Our families agreed, so my partner returned from visiting her mother the morning of the 24th, going against the direction of traffic (her train was a bit late, but tolerably so) and we’re visiting my parents in the new year.
This all dates back to last Christmas. As you may recall, it was a bit of a logistical nightmare. Flight cancellations, massive train delays across North America. People getting stuck on the side of the highway. It wasn’t pretty.
We didn’t get the worst of it, but we came close. We decided to incorporate a visit to Ottawa into our travel plans last year. We’d get the train to Kingston, then hop back on to Ottawa then spend New Years’ Eve in Montreal. Easy.
And, yet, there I was stuck on a train for two hours on Christmas Eve. All told, I arrived three hours late.. My partner was scheduled to join on Christmas Day. Cancelled. The rest of our trip was planned to the hour, so we weren’t just going to let it go. We managed to book her the last seat out of Billy Bishop to Ottawa. She spent Christmas alone (though I’m told she had a lovely day).
Other friends got stuck at American airports, or on the side of the 401. We can look around for someone to blame, but there’s the inescapable reality than late December weather is often hostile to travel. And if one flight gets cancelled, dozens people are jockeying for mostly sold out backups. If an airport delays or cancels all of it flights, thousands of people are making a John Candy like dash to the rental car counters. Or, more likely, they’re not going anywhere.
We did manage to salvage the rest of our trip. I got to Ottawa on time, and on to Montreal. Here’s a video from somewhere between Kingston and Montreal mere days after we all got stuck. The weather passed, things worked fine - as they usually do.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We got stuck for two hours on the way back from Montreal due to an electrical issue on one of the old Via trains. The new fleet can’t roll out soon enough.1
We can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether Air Canada is a bad airline (it isn’t) or if Via Rail is meeting up to our expectations (it’s not, but many of the reasons are beyond their control). Delta and Amtrak got just as stuck as they did. The reality is when every method of transportation is stretched thin and weather is volatile, bad things can happen.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to improve transportation policy. But some things are beyond our control. All it takes is a storm in the New York Metro or the Midwest to throw off North American air travel. If your plane is stuck at LaGuardia, you’re not leaving Toronto. The airline industry is a finely tuned machine, but all problems can cascade through the system. There’s not much we can do about that - especially at the busiest times of the year, when airports are running at capacity.
We should be grateful for modern mass transportation, but we also need to recognize it’s fallible - especially in winter. There’s very little anyone can do if trees fall on the tracks, or an airport gets clobbered by a snowstorm. This might not happen every year, but the specter of chaos always looms over holiday travel. It’s winter - not much we can do about that.
Of course, things look fine this year. Turns out we chose the wrong year to make alternate plans. But we’ve got a very non-traditional Christmas dinner planned for just the two of us, between turkeys. I’m looking forward to it, and relieved to be avoiding the rush. Christmas dinner will taste just as good in January.
Merry Christmas from South of Bloor!*
*Technically, South of Danforth
If all goes well, I’ll get to ride one of the new trains on my trip out to Kingston.