Planes, no Helens and Automobiles

Well, i would just like to share this with you all since it was an adventure in my life and it was kinda funny after I looked at it in retrospect and just so you could have a little chuckle at your blonde friend.... perhaps it was all that turkey yesterday that caused my brain to malfunction, who knows?? Anyways, i got up nice and early this morning, somewhere around the awful hour of 5:00 and got my little self ready for an airport run since today was the day! Helen was coming!! I grabbed a Timmy's cafe mocha to wake me up and put the tunes on and headed out on the road. I must confess that i didn't leave a lot of time for getting there but made it quite on time and parked and casually strolled into the terminal and promptly had to walk five miles since i was on the wrong end of things from where i parked. But nevertheless, there i was, all ready to greet my friend Helen and take her suitcase from her and to welcome her back to her home province of Ontario with a big smile and hug. Well, to my surprise and frustration, she never appeared.
And i waited and waited and i didn't know what to do. I wandered up and down the halls in a bit of a daze for a little while and finally came across a lady with a "can i help you?" badge on her shirt and i explained my dilemma and she said okay, i'll see what i can do. We had Helen paged overhead a few times, but as she didn't seem to be in the airport, that action was desparately ineffective!! Unfortunately, she couldn't do much since she was not allowed to tell me if Helen had landed "for security reasons, you see" No, i didn't see... if i need to locate someone, it's ridiculous if you can't tell me if she landed in TO at all... she might be in the air or in Bangkok or somewhere cozy waiting in an airport lounge cause she missed her flight... i was pretty frustrated. The attendent girl let me in the arrivals hall and we talked to the staff there but they again couldn't tell me anything either. They did nicely let me peer around the hall to see if my dear friend was there somewhere but alas and alack, she was not there. Now what???
I have to tell you that my brain was having conniption fits as it tried to best determine what it was to do next.... It's still hurting at the moment from all the mental calisthenics that it was forced to perform on very little sleep or nutrition!!!
See, i was in an awful mess cause first of all, i didn't have Helen's cell phone number. Secondly, i didn't have a cell phone with me to call her cell phone. Thirdly, it costs $3.85 to make a long-distance call from a payphone (what happened to a good old quarter?? Somehow between gas prices rising and the formation of the EU, i must have missed the price hike!!). So the next dilemma was who do i call? Okay, so i called Dad, and how did i call him with no cell phone and no change... well, i happened to be standing next to a nice lady who was waiting for her daughter to come in on the Harmony flight from Vancouver at 7:00 and i explained my dilemma to her and she called her husband over and he let me borrow their cell phone and i talked to Dad who unfortunately had no brilliant answers and so i hung up on him rather than stick these nice folks with a huge phone bill. They did their good deed for the day.
So no solutions yet!!! Hmmm... i called Carina, but alas she wasn't home cause i thought perhaps she could check on my computer in my in-box to determine if it was indeed today that Helen was arriving... cause i was having my doubts now. But alas, she was departed for areas of higher education already, leaving me with no recourse but to quickly hang up before the answering machine picked up and thus save myself that precious $3.85. For the other part of the dilemma was that i only had toonies in my wallet... no loonies... and the phone booths don't accept toonies... and do you think that anyone had a store open so i could purchase a measly stick of gum or a cookie to obtain some change? No way man, not in the bowels of the arrivals hall on the far end of the airport where i was hanging out. So that necessitated a trip all the way upstairs to the Departures hall where there was a significantly higher concentration of human figures from whom to beg change.
I changed a $5.00 bill for some loonies in the travel store which had just opened and finally got through to my mom who agreed to call Francine and see if she knew anything... again, i nearly got cut off cause i had to deposit an extra few quarters since the $3.85 only gets you one minute connection fee... insane!!! I kept thinking, what about first time visitors to the country, how do they function? Crazy!!!
So i hung up with Mom hoping against hope that she would indeed be able to determine what had occured... and then realized i had run out of loonies again and needed to again beg and borrow some coins from some individual.... i couldn't go back to the same lady again, she already thought i was nuts so i went to buy one of those delicious chocolate chunk cookies... however, there were frustrating people in the line in front of me who kept mis-ordering and screwing things up and i was like just get it right and get out of my way. The man kept wanting to put the ketchup packets in his pockets or in his luggage but the nice clerk lady kept telling him that he couldn't do that since security would have a fit if they saw that and that he was better off eating the ketcup then and there... I'm telling you that i nearly snatched those ketchup packets from him and squeezed them on myself so that i could stagger through the terminal feigning a large wound and hoping that someone would have pity on me and allow me to use their phone to call my parents... Fortunately, he finished up his business and allowed me to pay for my cookie and request lots of loonies from the cashier lady who was super nice and made me smile and made me happy. Thankyou lady!!!
I finally got through to mom again after having made my way all the way back to the barren arrivals hall and having no sight of my curly headed friend, called mom back and decided to head on home.
So the moral of the story is that you should always check the arrival dates on your friend's flights since if they're coming from B.C. and they tell you they are arriving at 6:22 am from Vancouver.. you should have put two and two together and realized that if they are leaving from Prince George on the 10th and arriving in Vancouver in the afternoon, that the arrival date is thence the 11th of October, not the 10th!!!
Hope you enjoy this epic saga of woe...