Flight ✈️ to Canada 🇨🇦

This tag-along trip with my husband’s company is the first time any of our children have travelled internationally and they couldn’t be more excited! As a whole, I felt underprepared for this adventure and I hadn’t planned out nearly as much as I usually do.

I found out that the hotel we’re staying at does not offer free continental breakfast. Although my husband‘s company will be feeding him first thing in the morning, the kids and I are on our own. As far as I could tell our hotel is about a 2 mile walk from the nearest grocery store. I packed snacks for the travel day there, snacks for breakfast the first morning, and snacks for the travel day back.

When I googled things to do in the area, the top hits were Lake Louise & Lake Moraine, and the gondola. But each of these was running at around $80 per ticket. I decided we’d just walk/hike the whole trip. Then our youngest son sprained his knee so walking and hiking were out and tour buses and gondola rides were back on my list.

AI wasn’t working well and depending on the day, I was getting different information regarding ticket availability, public transportation, etc., etc.. Besides that, the weather forecast was off and on saying it may or may not be raining while we were there. I ended up giving up on preplanning anything and decided to just show up and see what happened.

Day one: leave our house at 2:20 AM – arrive at the hotel 5:20 PM, walk 20 min to town at get sushi at Hello Sunshine. The food was super yummy and absolutely perfect after an incredibly long travel day.

I’m going to take a few paragraphs to talk about the flights. First, my youngest son sprained his knee 5 days before we departed. Technically, he could still walk but I was worried that navigating multiple airports would be too much pressure on his knee. It was still causing him some pain to bear weight. He’s got a disc golf tournament the day after we get back home from our trip and I really wanted his knee to heal as quickly as possible. Based on the advice of AI, I had my husband request wheelchair service for the entire trip. This let him sit and ride for the long walks and sit instead of standing in line. He was not happy about the wheelchair. He found the entire production extremely embarrassing. He accepted it because I told him his choices were to accept the wheelchair or he and would skip the trip. It took longer for him to get through TSA, I didn’t time it, but I’m guessing at least an extra 15 minutes. It was a special case because he’s in the “ages 12 and under” category. We opted to remove his knee brace to speed things along.

As we were heading to bed the night before the flight, my husband got a text that our first flight was delayed by an hour. Unfortunately, the hour delay to our first flight was going to cause us to miss our connecting flight. So we stayed up to call the airline and have them reroute us. The reroute required us to leave 30 minutes earlier and arrive 1 hour later.

When my husband booked the original flight he booked us all in the same row A, B, C and D, E. Since there are 5 people in our family we often have an odd person out. We’re used to it. Getting a trio of seats and a pair of seats is as good as it gets! When we were rerouted we got spilt up into 5 middle seats. This is a huge problem for me because you can’t pick your seat mates. Airlines don’t background check passengers, and ya know – the world is broken. Let’s not even mention the horrible things my kids can see on someone else’s in-flight entertainment screen. People can look at literally anything on their phones. And plane seats are not roomy in economy. So, we spent an extra 30 minutes when we checked our luggage to request the attendant manually adjust the seating. They do this by moving other passengers around. Sorry, not sorry.

For the first leg of the trip, we ended up with 1 middle seat, a window-middle pair, and an aisle-middle pair. Since our oldest son is 16 the airline doesn’t really count him as a child. I was totally happy with this arrangement; it was infinitely better than 5 middle seats spread throughout the aircraft. I ended up taking the single middle seat because #momlife.

But wait…! Apparently, the flight was not completely full, because no one ever came to take the window seat next to me. So… my friends… I got a window seat! My favorite! I can’t remember the last time I got a window seat. It was probably before I had kids, so let’s say at least 16 years ago. The window seat has the most beautiful view. On this particular flight we were headed east and got to see the sunrise-ish. So now y’all get a photo dump of the view out my window, which I’ll spread out between my paragraphs.

Next flight, same setup but this time I got the middle for reals.

🇨🇦 Stayed tuned for our adventures in Canada!