Good bye Hong Kong
Today we fly home. Our flight departs Hong Kong on Air Canada flight 8 at 7:00 pm. First we have some unfinished business in Kowloon. Gary has 6 shirts to pick up from his tailor.
Kowloon streets are lined with Chinese banyan trees as seen above in the picture.
We also find a few souvenirs and a small duffel bag to fit the extra stuff we have to pack back home. We are each allowed 2 checked bags although we only came with one bag each we are taking 3 checked bags (total) home.
We passed through customs, security and found a restaurant to refuel ourselves before the 12 hours of sitting in the Air Canada 787 Dreamliner.
We end up sitting on the tarmac for an extra half hour because of some inconsiderate millennial passenger was late. We were told by Air Canada staff that they would have left him behind but his luggage was already on the plane and it was back five containers into the hold. It would have meant unloading the plane to find luggage.
When the guilty person arrived they were more than arrogant telling people to move their stuff out of the overhead bins so he could fit his suitcase in. The Air Canada staff set him straight real quick! We had an excellent flight crew once again on Air Canada.
We finally got clearance for take off and we were on our way.
When we arrived in Vancouver we had to collect our luggage and pass through customs. We then dropped off our luggage for the connecting flights. We travel light compared to 90% of the people that surrounded us.
Once again we refuelled ourselves at YVR Monks restaurant. We got to the gate and when loading the Air Canada lady checking our boarding passes said to Gary “Mr Lawrence, thanks for only having one small bag”. They were pleading with people to check their suitcases as the CRJ jet has small overhead bins. Most people would not check their huge carry on bags.
We sat on the runway for 40 minutes because there was a shortage of ground staff to load our luggage onto the plane. As a result we were 45 minutes late arriving in Saskatoon.
We got home safe and tired. Over 30 hours of travel without going to bed. Most of the snow has melted! Our first question when we got home was “where are we going next winter?”
Summary
Summary of our travels January 8 – March 20, 2019:
- 71 nights away from home
- 17 flights
- 5 airlines
- 31,567 Km of flying
- 3 ferries
- 282 Km on ferries
- We utilized Grab which was great in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand