So me mate Dave… well, I have 17 of them, so best clarify; it’s not the one who lives up the road, nor the one who went to court for beating his wife. Not the one who for 6 years became ‘me mate, Doris’, neither. This is the one who lives in Canada. Oooohhhh, Canada. As their national anthem calls it. And his son’s getting married, in like 2 weeks time. But he did warn us. We had a ‘heads up’, about a year ago. So, dutifully, last October, we booked our flights to Toronto. British Airways were very helpful and said we could splash a few thousand Air Miles for a pair of tickets. Very nice of them. And we thought… that it’s too far to go for a weekend, so let’s make a holiday of it and go somewhere I’ve (for some totally unaccountable reason) always wanted to go. Newfoundland!!! Up there in the sub-arctic wilderness of Canada’s most easterliness, sits this island that is remote, bleak and apparently geographically stunning. So last October we booked it. All of it. Flights from Toronto (its over 3 hours), to St John’s, the ‘capital’ (population just over 100,000), get a car, work our way slowly across about 400 miles to Deer Lake, on the other end, and fly back to Toronto for the wedding. Easy peasy. Booked some lovely hotels… ok, Newfoundland doesn’t do ‘lovely hotels’ like other places, so we booked places where hopefully Mel won’t need her full-body rubber gloves to get to the shower. One week, leisurely drives, lots of hikes. Ahhhhhh. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ll tell you what could go wrong. Last week Newfoundland caught fire. That wrong enough for ya!!!

Wildfires erupted all over mainly the Eastern end of the island. Where we’re flying to. Oh. Never mind, I can just accelerate through the flames… but in fact it’s the smoke. Ruins the air, pollutes and affects the views. In that you can’t see them.

So I called Air Canada, see if I could change our flights to fly to Deer Lake instead, and just tour round the western half of the island. But Air Canada (just like every other fucking airline in the world), have replaced customer service with plink-plink music, which plays for all eternity. So I was forced to ‘do it online’ and actually got a full refund for that flight!!! When does that happen??? Booked the new one (eventually), sorted out the car and then had to cancel our first 2 hotels. Hmmmm. Who both have a ‘cancellations within two weeks cost the price of 1 night’ policy. So I emailed them. Told them (lies!), tales of woe (more lies!), Mel’s respiratory issues (MORE FUCKING LIES!!!!), and before I even had to invent the burial of an aunt, they were cancelled, no charges. I felt bad. For… just a minute. I love Canadians. The whole process couldn’t have taken more than 17 hours.

Obviously, the cost of everything new we booked was 6 times that of those we’d cancelled; I hate Canadians.

But the holiday will be had!! Leaving Thursday. Stay tuned or you might miss something important! Like breakfast. Croissants. Moose.

Happy Friday

A xxxx