Flight to California

So this was quite the trip. The day before we (Mick - one of our manufacturers from China, and myself) left for San Jose our company, Generation PV, held an all day training seminar at the Radisson in Markham for our dealers. This left me with very little sleep. Sunday morning Mick and I drove to terminal 2. Traffic plus a few stops put us a little behind. Then we found out that Enterprise didn't have an office at the terminal to drop off cars. After a good time of thinking we had the idea of leaving the rental car in the parking garage with the key under the tire for someone to pick up for us. We then ran in to Terminal 2 with all our bags. With our Air Canada tickets in hand we lined up at an overgrowing line up for those insanely stupid self check in computers that only Air Canada seemed to have. After a long wait we noticed they were calling people out of line who were going to be late for their flight. It was 1 hr from take off and we had a glimmer of hope that they would call us out so we wouldn't have to wait much longer. Such was not the case. They called every flight but ours. So Mick spoke up and asked when we would be called so we could check in for the flight to San Jose. The Air Canada guy responded with "We don't fly there."

In tiny letters at the bottom of the 2nd page was "operated by United." Apparently flight number AC-XXXX was just a nice number that meant nothing as it was non-existent and United just gives a new number anyways. Fun!

So by the time we left the Air Canada line and found the United counter it was about 50 minutes till take off. "Too late" was the lady's response. "Bags have to be checked 45 mins before take off". Yeah, it's 50 minutes, check your watch. - In hind sense it probably wasn't the best thing to say. A few walkie talkie conversations later and the answer was the same. Oh Joy. OK. Find us another flight please. "There is nothing available going into San Jose, San Francisco, or LA, or bordering States." Hmm. Long story short after a lot of pleading she found us a flight to LA via American Airlines then we would have to drive up 5-6 hours through the night and arrive in San Jose early the next morning. This would be fine. Fine, if she actually booked it. On the way to Terminal 3 we stopped by Air Canada and checked that everything was fine. OK, we had their blessing and caught the shuttle to T3. After waiting in line the check in guy said that they never released the tickets to AA. So we jumped back to T2 and Air Canada (new lady) said that the United lady didn't have permission to do what she did in the first place. Great! So it was back and forth a total of 5 times between T2 and T3 (in which time we got to return our rental car) before everything finally cleared and we boarded the plane. We arrived in LA around 9:30PM and grabbed a car and headed north for San Jose. After switching half way I drove into San Jose at 4:30AM local time (7:30AM Toronto time) Needless to say we were both "knackered" A few hours later we were teaching a seminar and setting up for the tradeshow. Sounds like a good start to a business trip, eh?