Dorothy & Karen’s excellent European adventure

This year is a milestone birthday, 50.  I thought that I should celebrate it somewhere special so we decided that a Mediterrean cruise would .

We left the house around 11:00am and made a quick detour to Dundas to check out Kris and Becca’s new house that they just moved into yesterday.  We did not have a lot of time to visit since we needed to get to Toronto so that Karen’s brother Ross could drop us off at Toronto Pearson International Airport.  He was also kind enough to let us leave the car at his house.

Since we are flying on Aeroplan miles (41000 miles plus $544.96 CAD for taxes and fees / person), we made our way to the Air Canada International counters.  We noticed that the line was really long but we saw that if you checked in online, all you had to do was go a kiosk, print your luggage tags and drop off your bags.  That took all of ten minutes.  I’m sure those people are still waiting. We headed over to security where we were greeted with another long line.  I spotted the NEXUS lane and asked an agent if we could use our cards even though we were not flying into the United States.  She said we could and after about another ten minutes we were on our way to our gate.

Karen and I each have a TD Visa Aeroplan card and one of the benefits is that you get access to an Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge once a year when flying on an Aeroplan reward ticket.  The fine print states though that only the person whose miles were used to purchase the flights actually gets the access.  Since we pool our miles together, it was me who only had access.  But we thought we would give it a shot anyways.  We walked somewhat confidently over to the lounge, presented the lady with our credit cards and boarding passes and after a few minutes of finagling on her part, we were in.  Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounges are great for many reasons but the top three are it’s super quiet, a selection of food and best of all, all the free liquor you can drink.  We got to spend about an hour fueling up before heading down to our gate to catch the 5:05pm flight to Venice, Italy.

We boarded the plane and got settled for our eight hour flight.  The time went by slow but was broken up with episodes of “Vinyl” from HBO, reading and can you believe it a meal.  The only thing that we did not get really any of was sleep.