Toronto, eh!
This past week I was in Toronto – well, not the city itself, but a couple suburbs outside the city. For those of you who don’t know, Toronto is the 5th largest metropolitan area in North America. I can believe it. Toronto rivals Houston for crappy traffic. It takes over an hour to drive anywhere despite having 12-14 lane divided highways with both an express and local section. That’s just 12-14 lanes of extra parking lot in Toronto.
The trip was relatively uneventful until the end. I drove back to the airport and dropped off my rental car. I was told all the non-Air Canada flights left out of Terminal 3. I walk inside, look at the boards and don’t see my flight listed anywhere. That’s weird. Luckily there was a another kid (maybe 21 years old) staring at the boards as well that was also supposed to be on my flight. At least I wasn’t imagining my flight! He seemed to recall his information said the flight left out of Terminal 2 so, since we were there fairly early, we checked it out.
We walk up to the airport tram and only see signs for Terminal 1. We ask an airport worker if the tram went to Terminal 2. “Yup”, he said. Ok, we get on the tram. It stops at Terminal 1, the doors open and everyone leaves. I guess no one is continuing on to Terminal 2. People get on, the doors close and the tram goes back the same way it came – towards Terminal 3. The kid and I both look at each other. Uh oh. Also note that this kid is hauling around a bag, a computer bag and his snowboard the whole time.
We get back to Terminal 3 and ask another airport worker how to get to Terminal 2 – he says we have to use the tram on the other side (in the tram station there were trams that ran on both sides). Ok, we get on that tram and it takes up back to Terminal 1. I look outside the tram and see the tracks end here so this tram was going to do the same trip as the other one.
Ok, we get out at Terminal 1 and head to an information booth. We give the lady our flight information and she says all American Airlines flights leave from Terminal 3. We said that the boards there didn’t show our flight. She looked our flight up and it didn’t even exist in the airport system! Weird. Our flight had vanished.
The kid called one of his friends to check the American Airlines website. The website showed our flight – now why didn’t Toronto’s airport system show it?
At this point we just went to the American Airlines check-in counter and checked in. The flight existed on the check-in kiosks so we figured we were ok (although it still wasn’t on the boards).
After all that we made it into the gates with time to spare and got home to Boston a-ok.
ROTFL