Off to Canada: New York Debacle Wed 20 July 2016

20 th July 2016

We arrived in the Big Apple , JFK, and the poor start to our world tour continued. We arrived late and stressed out knowing that we were highly likely to miss the connecting flight.

We rushed off the plane, collected our baggage and got through immigration and customs ( with whom we had no problems at all .. Can you believe it - at JFK!)  but it was too late as far as we knew.  As we got to departure gate , guess what LAN staff told us to 'chill' as the LANTAM  flight which we were connecting to was running two hours late. . The LAN staff thought they were doing us a favour... well they weren't...we had a connecting train in Toronto for Ottawa. We complained and they said they'd 'try' and put us on another plane... did they? NO! What's more - they wouldn't take responsibility for compensating us for the missed train. So as a measure to save money, I cancelled the train ticket so at least we'd get some money back.

Finally we arrived in Toronto. We had missed the 4:30pm train to Ottawa. By the time we arrived at the station it was nearly 5, and we thought we had to purchase new tickets to Ottawa. Bearing in mind we paid $198 for two return tickets, a single was going to be $200 each! We just couldn't believe it. Then a MIRACLE! I explained to the ticket sales clerk that we had missed the train, because our airline arrived late and that's why we cancelled the ticket. She said she 'd see what she could do - well to our surprise she re-instated our original tickets and it didn't cost us a dollar extra. If she hadn't been behind the glass counter,  I would have given her a kiss and hug. Lucky we were in Canada, she look through the system, checked options and got our tickets re-instated. Anywhere else in the world and the it would have been 'jobs worth' to serve customers.

So at 6:30 pm , we caught the train to Ottawa and off to see Claire and Ryan.


Memorable food and drink 
Nothing really, it was all aircraft food , which wasn't bad. The Chilean wines on board compensated

Thought of the day  
I hate flying.. and this was just the start. I wish I could fly business class ( for free) .





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