Bad Flights, Good Gigs

US Airways = Useless Airways, They buggered up the outgoing flight completely, or at least the conncection at Philadelphia. We flew from Manchester, had possibly the worst food I have ever tried and failed to eat on an airplane and then had a planned 6 hour wait at Philly for a Halifax, Nova Scotia, flight.

So customs and immigration take about an hour - yes even though you are only transiting to Canada you have to collect your bags from the transatlantic flight, complete an American ESTA (electronic immigration form) before flying from the UK and do the whole 'Why are you visiting the United States?' thing, even though you're not actually visiting.

Then after exploring Philadelphia Airport from Terminal A to Terminal F - even with food stops (orange chicken and noodles, yum!) it's barely more than a distraction of more than two hand a half hours - we end up sitting at our gate for departure to Halifax for a couple of hours waiting for our 9.15 p.m. flight. (I had a book.) So at about 8.45 p.m. they start to check our passports, ready (we assume) for boarding. Then when they're halfway through the line the word filters out that the flight has been cancelled due to a storm at Halifax. There's no announcement as such, but word flies round fast. Go to the customer services desk in the main concourse, the gate staff tell us. We know there's going to be a huge lineup so we grab our carry-on bags (the checked luggage having gone on to the transit belt after the stop at customs) and we sprint. Even with my gammy foot (plantar fasciitis - ouch) we make it ahead of the crowd.

Yes there's apparently a storm at Halifax, they say, even though Philly itself is hot and dry, though very humid (like breathing soup). There's also another flight queuing up with ours - apparently there's also a storm between Philly and San Francisco.

No, they won't pay for overnight accommodation because they don't do that for bad weather, only for delays due to something they are responsible for, but they'll give us a number of a last-minute hotel service with 'the best rates' so we can get our head down for a few hours and they'll rebook us on the ten a.m. flight... err no they won't... it's already full between the clerk checking once, talking to us, and trying to grab us three seats. The best she can do is a 6.15 a.m. flight out to Boston and a connection from Boston to Halifax with barely 45 minutes to change planes (and terminals) at Logan Airport. We are not optimistic about the connection, we've been to Logan before and it was a building site, but the next available flight after that isn't until 6.00 p.m. and we have a 2.00 p.m. gig at Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival.

So we take the 6.15 a.m. flight and the number for the hotel booking service and then discover that we need 50 cents now for a local call (it was 25 cents last time we were there). So we scrabble for coinage. Luckily Hilary had a couple of American quarters.

The best we can do is $69 plus tax for each of two rooms and we catch the steamy hotel shuttle without benefit of luggage. Thankfully I have my (diabetic) medication with me and a clean pair of knickers and socks in my hand luggage, but no change of outer clothes and in the choking, sweaty heat they are rapidly getting not nice to be near.

One bright spot. The hotel has free internet and my skype phone credit is topped up, so I try to call Debs, the transport person from Lunenburg Festival, so that her chap who's supposed to collect us at 11.30 p.m. in Halifax doen't set off. I'm thwarted. Because of the hour's time difference, my 10.00 p.m. is Nova Scotia's 11.00 p.m. and her cellphone is already switched off. So pickup guy has a wasted journey, two hours drive each way. He actually set out before the flight was cancelled. I leave a message on Deb's phone and on the festival office phone to tell them what's happened and what time we're getting in and hope that there will be someone else to pick us up in the morning.

We check the TV weather channel in the hotel room and we can see the thunderstorm between Philly and San Francisco, but Halifax looks calm. What storm?

The hotel alarm call comes at 4.00 a.m., barely five hours after we've fallen into bed, drugged with exhaustion. We get downstairs in yesterday's clothing to find that some other bloody arsehole of a passenger has kidnapped our booked 4.30 a.m. airport shuttle and gone off at 4.20 telling the manager he was the one who'd booked it. Bloody charming. May all his future flights be delayed. But we grab the shuttle bus on its return with a family heading for San Francisco and similarly doing an overnight without benefit of checked luggage and get to the airport for 5.00 a.m, which is what we were aiming for anyway.

Joy and Bliss. The 6.15 a.m. flight departs on time. Now the staff are telling us it wasn't a storm at Halifax last night, it was fog. Make up your minds, guys. Get your story straight.

And amazingly we make the connection at Logan even though we have to go through yet another set of security gates and I get singled out for one of the new naked photo booth checks (the ones where they basically x-ray your clothes off you). Nice. I can have the pat down if I prefer. No, go ahead, give the staff a good laugh. I don't have to look them in the face afterwards. i don't even let myself wonder whether they have lady peeping toms on the other end of the machine, or not.

So we get to Halifax, a nice little airport, and it's still only 9.30 a.m. even though our watches have gone forward an hour again. We don't need work permits for Canada because we're 'cultural performers' i.e. not playing bar gigs and taking jobs away from Canadian musicians, but we still have to stop off at the immigration office and present our festival contracts to prove the whole not-playing-bar-gigs thing, and to get a temporary work permit stamp to make us all nice and legal. I have all the paperwork. It isn't a problem.

So at the immigration office there are two men (not together) in front of us and one is taking forever. There's only one girl on duty. The passengers who came in on the same flight - who were all last night's cancellees and with whom we have bonded by now - all try and follow us into the lineup. No guys, go ahead, this is only for people who are working in Canada. Bye. Have a nice trip. Half an hour passes and eventually guy number one leaves and guy number two steps froward. Time passes. We can see the arrivals hall. It's completely empty.

The officer who checked our passports and sent us to this lineup, telling us it wouldn't take long, saunters up the corridor and looks surprised. 'You still here?' We shrug. 'Yep.' 'You sure you're not playing bar gigs?' 'Nope.' We know the rules. We're playing Canadian festivals and unlike English festivals, they're dry. He takes our passports, stamps them and says, 'OK, off you go!' We skip off to the baggage hall grateful for small mercies, knowing that would never happen in the USA, to find all the other passengers have gone and our three bags - together with one that must belong to the guy still at the immigration desk - piled neatly in a corner.

Now all we have to hope for is that there's someone beyond the barrier with a card saying Artisan on it.

Well, she hasn't got a card but she pounces on us as we exit the baggage hall with that perculiarly North American pronunciation of Artisan which sounds like ARdizn. It's Deb herself. No she didn't get the message, but she figured we'd be arriving around tennish so she came anyway - and the office had called her while she was in transit with our message from last night. She'd almost been about to leave since the last passenger off the plane had said there was no one still in there. We explained about the immigration log jam. She might need to know that another year.

She's starving and so are we. We stop off at Tim Hortons just outside the airport. Luckily Hilary has had the foresight to change enough Canadian dollars. I haven't because the festival has arranged to pay us in cash at the beginning of the weekend and I reckon nothing to losing money on changing English to Canadian and then Canadian to English at the end of the tour.

It's about an hour and a half to Lunenburg. We eventually arrive 20 minutes before our 2.00 p.m. gig and have to do it in the clothes we've been travelling in for 48 hours. It's blazing hot, unusually humid for Lunenburg (on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia) and the gig is ooutside at the Fisheries Museum without a PA. I tell you, it doesn't matter how tired we are, we are in no danger of falling over because our clothes can now stand up by themselves.

Luckily the Artisan fans have turned up to welcome us and we're shredded, but not too shredded to deliver the goods.

As a PS to all this, the chap who did turn up to the airport at 11.30 p.m. to meet the original flight that was supposedly cancelled for a storm said: 'What storm?' So we're left wondering if the airline cancelled the plane and just told us it was a storm to save themselves paying for all our accommodations.

And the kicker is that our travel insurance company will not pay out for the accommodation (even though there was an overnight stay involved) because the delay insurance doesn't kick in unless there's a 12 hour delay. The flight we were due to fly out on was 9.15 p.m. and the flight we did fly out on was 6.15 a.m. Bummer.

This post was titled 'Bad Flights, Good Gigs'. The good gigs bit will have to wait until the next post. I'm exhausted just re-living all that vicariously through the keyboard.

Canada was amazing... more soon

Bad Flights, Good Gigs

US Airways = Useless Airways, They buggered up the outgoing flight completely, or at least the conncection at Philadelphia. We flew from Manchester, had possibly the worst food I have ever tried and failed to eat on an airplane and then had a planned 6 hour wait at Philly for a Halifax, Nova Scotia, flight.

So customs and immigration take about an hour - yes even though you are only transiting to Canada you have to collect your bags from the transatlantic flight, complete an American ESTA (electronic immigration form) before flying from the UK and do the whole 'Why are you visiting the United States?' thing, even though you're not actually visiting.

Then after exploring Philadelphia Airport from Terminal A to Terminal F - even with food stops (orange chicken and noodles, yum!) it's barely more than a distraction of more than two hand a half hours - we end up sitting at our gate for departure to Halifax for a couple of hours waiting for our 9.15 p.m. flight. (I had a book.) So at about 8.45 p.m. they start to check our passports, ready (we assume) for boarding. Then when they're halfway through the line the word filters out that the flight has been cancelled due to a storm at Halifax. There's no announcement as such, but word flies round fast. Go to the customer services desk in the main concourse, the gate staff tell us. We know there's going to be a huge lineup so we grab our carry-on bags (the checked luggage having gone on to the transit belt after the stop at customs) and we sprint. Even with my gammy foot (plantar fasciitis - ouch) we make it ahead of the crowd.

Yes there's apparently a storm at Halifax, they say, even though Philly itself is hot and dry, though very humid (like breathing soup). There's also another flight queuing up with ours - apparently there's also a storm between Philly and San Francisco.

No, they won't pay for overnight accommodation because they don't do that for bad weather, only for delays due to something they are responsible for, but they'll give us a number of a last-minute hotel service with 'the best rates' so we can get our head down for a few hours and they'll rebook us on the ten a.m. flight... err no they won't... it's already full between the clerk checking once, talking to us, and trying to grab us three seats. The best she can do is a 6.15 a.m. flight out to Boston and a connection from Boston to Halifax with barely 45 minutes to change planes (and terminals) at Logan Airport. We are not optimistic about the connection, we've been to Logan before and it was a building site, but the next available flight after that isn't until 6.00 p.m. and we have a 2.00 p.m. gig at Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival.

So we take the 6.15 a.m. flight and the number for the hotel booking service and then discover that we need 50 cents now for a local call (it was 25 cents last time we were there). So we scrabble for coinage. Luckily Hilary had a couple of American quarters.

The best we can do is $69 plus tax for each of two rooms and we catch the steamy hotel shuttle without benefit of luggage. Thankfully I have my (diabetic) medication with me and a clean pair of knickers and socks in my hand luggage, but no change of outer clothes and in the choking, sweaty heat they are rapidly getting not nice to be near.

One bright spot. The hotel has free internet and my skype phone credit is topped up, so I try to call Debs, the transport person from Lunenburg Festival, so that her chap who's supposed to collect us at 11.30 p.m. in Halifax doen't set off. I'm thwarted. Because of the hour's time difference, my 10.00 p.m. is Nova Scotia's 11.00 p.m. and her cellphone is already switched off. So pickup guy has a wasted journey, two hours drive each way. He actually set out before the flight was cancelled. I leave a message on Deb's phone and on the festival office phone to tell them what's happened and what time we're getting in and hope that there will be someone else to pick us up in the morning.

We check the TV weather channel in the hotel room and we can see the thunderstorm between Philly and San Francisco, but Halifax looks calm. What storm?

The hotel alarm call comes at 4.00 a.m., barely five hours after we've fallen into bed, drugged with exhaustion. We get downstairs in yesterday's clothing to find that some other bloody arsehole of a passenger has kidnapped our booked 4.30 a.m. airport shuttle and gone off at 4.20 telling the manager he was the one who'd booked it. Bloody charming. May all his future flights be delayed. But we grab the shuttle bus on its return with a family heading for San Francisco and similarly doing an overnight without benefit of checked luggage and get to the airport for 5.00 a.m, which is what we were aiming for anyway.

Joy and Bliss. The 6.15 a.m. flight departs on time. Now the staff are telling us it wasn't a storm at Halifax last night, it was fog. Make up your minds, guys. Get your story straight.

And amazingly we make the connection at Logan even though we have to go through yet another set of security gates and I get singled out for one of the new naked photo booth checks (the ones where they basically x-ray your clothes off you). Nice. I can have the pat down if I prefer. No, go ahead, give the staff a good laugh. I don't have to look them in the face afterwards. i don't even let myself wonder whether they have lady peeping toms on the other end of the machine, or not.

So we get to Halifax, a nice little airport, and it's still only 9.30 a.m. even though our watches have gone forward an hour again. We don't need work permits for Canada because we're 'cultural performers' i.e. not playing bar gigs and taking jobs away from Canadian musicians, but we still have to stop off at the immigration office and present our festival contracts to prove the whole not-playing-bar-gigs thing, and to get a temporary work permit stamp to make us all nice and legal. I have all the paperwork. It isn't a problem.

So at the immigration office there are two men (not together) in front of us and one is taking forever. There's only one girl on duty. The passengers who came in on the same flight - who were all last night's cancellees and with whom we have bonded by now - all try and follow us into the lineup. No guys, go ahead, this is only for people who are working in Canada. Bye. Have a nice trip. Half an hour passes and eventually guy number one leaves and guy number two steps froward. Time passes. We can see the arrivals hall. It's completely empty.

The officer who checked our passports and sent us to this lineup, telling us it wouldn't take long, saunters up the corridor and looks surprised. 'You still here?' We shrug. 'Yep.' 'You sure you're not playing bar gigs?' 'Nope.' We know the rules. We're playing Canadian festivals and unlike English festivals, they're dry. He takes our passports, stamps them and says, 'OK, off you go!' We skip off to the baggage hall grateful for small mercies, knowing that would never happen in the USA, to find all the other passengers have gone and our three bags - together with one that must belong to the guy still at the immigration desk - piled neatly in a corner.

Now all we have to hope for is that there's someone beyond the barrier with a card saying Artisan on it.

Well, she hasn't got a card but she pounces on us as we exit the baggage hall with that perculiarly North American pronunciation of Artisan which sounds like ARdizn. It's Deb herself. No she didn't get the message, but she figured we'd be arriving around tennish so she came anyway - and the office had called her while she was in transit with our message from last night. She'd almost been about to leave since the last passenger off the plane had said there was no one still in there. We explained about the immigration log jam. She might need to know that another year.

She's starving and so are we. We stop off at Tim Hortons just outside the airport. Luckily Hilary has had the foresight to change enough Canadian dollars. I haven't because the festival has arranged to pay us in cash at the beginning of the weekend and I reckon nothing to losing money on changing English to Canadian and then Canadian to English at the end of the tour.

It's about an hour and a half to Lunenburg. We eventually arrive 20 minutes before our 2.00 p.m. gig and have to do it in the clothes we've been travelling in for 48 hours. It's blazing hot, unusually humid for Lunenburg (on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia) and the gig is ooutside at the Fisheries Museum without a PA. I tell you, it doesn't matter how tired we are, we are in no danger of falling over because our clothes can now stand up by themselves.

Luckily the Artisan fans have turned up to welcome us and we're shredded, but not too shredded to deliver the goods.

As a PS to all this, the chap who did turn up to the airport at 11.30 p.m. to meet the original flight that was supposedly cancelled for a storm said: 'What storm?' So we're left wondering if the airline cancelled the plane and just told us it was a storm to save themselves paying for all our accommodations.

And the kicker is that our travel insurance company will not pay out for the accommodation (even though there was an overnight stay involved) because the delay insurance doesn't kick in unless there's a 12 hour delay. The flight we were due to fly out on was 9.15 p.m. and the flight we did fly out on was 6.15 a.m. Bummer.

This post was titled 'Bad Flights, Good Gigs'. The good gigs bit will have to wait until the next post. I'm exhausted just re-living all that vicariously through the keyboard.

Canada was amazing... more soon