Head Tale

Made it to St. John’s after a 3:30am wake-up call, a 6am departure and two three hour flights – first to Toronto and then another one to St. John’s.  When I fly, it tends to be WestJet or on a charter taking me to sunny climes so this was the first time I’ve been on Air Canada in years.  And I’ve got to say, I was pretty impressed…

– the initial reason we chose Air Canada over WestJet – instead of flying to Calgary, having a long layover then finally heading east then getting here at like 10pm, we had two basically direct flights – one to Toronto with a brief (less than an hour) layover then another direct to St. John’s that got us here at 4:30pm local time.
– lots of leg room in our seats (always an issue with me at 6’2″)
– the jet we were on was two seats on each side instead of three.  Perfect for this trip as we’re not traveling with Pace so we don’t have to share “our” space with anyone else
– their seat-back entertainment system is a full-touch screen of movies, TV shows (pre-recorded instead of live though), music (including both XM Radio and a wide range of albums – I listened to everything from Harry Connick Jr. to Kanye West!), kid’s entertainment, a very informative rotating map of where the plane is at, its speed and all that good stuff.  It even has a USB plug so you can charge your iPhone or other electronic device!

Because it’s air travel, of course there are some negatives…
– no in-flight snacks (not even pretzels or something similar) on either leg of our journey but we’d packed our own lunch and snacks knowing this.
– oh, we also had to pay extra to check a second bag.  Not sure if WestJet has moved to this policy but a number of airlines have.
– this has nothing to do with Air Canada but I had to take my shoes off at the Regina airport – possibly the single most stupid, reactive security measure ever invented (no, I take that back,  People’s inability to take a *sealed* bottle of water through security is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.   Hmm, actually don’t get me started on airport security in general or I’ll have to break out my rarely used Rant tag!)