Lightning Strike

Lightning Strike

We are all packed and ready for Nova Scotia on Monday, but we may or may not have that option after all. A few days ago, we got a notice from Air Canada that they are trying to avert a pilot’s strike that is set to begin on Wednesday unless they can all come to terms. By Canadian law, they have to give a 72 hour notice if the strike is going forward. That means we might find out on Sunday night that they are likely to be going on strike on Wednesday. Our trip into Halifax, a place hard (but not impossible) to get to by any other carrier than Air Canada, is scheduled to go in on Monday and out the following Wednesday. Air Canada suggested and offered to allow us to reschedule our trip to another time, but given the nature of our motorcycle trip, that would be a scheduling nightmare for four busy couples.

Yesterday I went through the process of considering what the logistics and breakage costs would be for a broken play on this trip. I start by assuming that if Air Canada cancels flights, we will be able to keep flight credits from them. As it is, I used a bunch of flight credits that were owed me from 20020 when COVID caused us to cancel our summer Krakow extravaganza. The other expenses consist of motorcycle and car rentals and hotels for four couples over nine days. This morning I spoke to the motorcycle rental place and since we have all given a 50% deposit, he just said that he would refund us the money since he preferred not to roll a credit forward. Good guy. The hotel bookings were all done through booking.com and five of the nine nights were fully cancellable (one of the reasons I use booking.com…good app). The other four involve one hotel in Halifax where we are bookending three nights of reservations. That was where the big money in this cancellation plan resides. They told me that they have a lenient refund policy when something like a airline strike occurs, so not to worry, they would authorize booking.com to give us a full refund. Good hotel. I didn’t bother calling the little $113/night hotel that also had a non-refundable deposit, but I bet they would concede as well if the strike occurs. So the advance damage control was all brought under good control.

My biggest concern was the timing of the whole strike. We could get a notice on Sunday night that they have declared a strike for Wednesday that might or might not involve cancelling our flights on Monday. Since no one knows how long such a strike would be in effect, I was equally or more concerned about getting out of Nova Scotia the following week. How long do airline strikes usually last? Google tells me that they generally last less than a week. Assuming a degree of efficiency in restoring service, that puts us right on the cusp with this trip. I assumed, as the surrogate trip manager for all four couples (three of which were booked on Air Canada), that the prudent thing to do would be to cancel the whole trip if we got a strike notice on Sunday night. My thinking was that we didn’t want or need to be stranded in Halifax after a week of motorcycling.

Then I called up Steve and Maggie, two of our fellow travelers, to test their risk appetites. I had notified everyone about minimizing the breakage, so I assumed that they would just want to cancel to be conservative. When you meet Steve and Maggie, they give off an air of being conservative people. They are both from Minnesota and have that solid Midwestern way about them. Steve is always taking motorcycle safety training classes and lessons on riding (and writing about them online) and seems like a very buttoned up kind of guy. Maggie seems even more conservative and as a copy editor in her career, who was forever correcting spelling and grammar, she comes across like a schoolmarm. Neither seem on the surface to be big risk takers. I was wrong in this instance. Steve immediately said they would go to the airport on Monday and just see what would happen. It had never occurred to me to do that. I assumed we would not go the airport unless we knew the strike had been averted.

On the topic of potentially getting stranded in Halifax, Steve just laughed and said that we could rent a car or take a ferry to Portland, Maine or Boston and just fly home from there. It all made perfect sense and it snapped me out of my broken play, risk averse frame of mind. In fact, given my false assumption that I was more of a risk taker than Steve, it made me feel sheepish for being so timid on the travel front. I remember once in my youth trying to convince an elderly aunt and uncle from Upstate New York to drive down to our home in the suburbs of New York City for a holiday gathering. These two country mice were scared to death to drive in the New York City Metro area and declined the invitation saying that they were afraid that anything could happen to them if they came to New York City like that. They were probably about the same age I am now. I might add that Steve and Maggie are a few years older than Kim and me. Not only have I traveled internationally quite extensively, but this is Canada for Christ’s sake, a country I lived in for two years and I have travelled to many, many times. I’ve even lived in Maine for three years if, by chance, we needed to work our way down the northeast by car. I really truly had nothing to be so worried about and for the life of me, I don’t know why I have been the least bit sheepish about this potential event.

I have now changed my attitude 180 degrees and feel that we will be flying to Nova Scotia on Monday unless the Air Canada pilot strike specifically causes the cancellation of our flight. I’m going to ride a motorcycle across slippery wet leaves in a part of the world where I’ve never been before, but is supposed to be quite beautiful. We will ride the Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island, go up to Ingonish Beach and take the ferry across to Price Edward Island, and take the ferry across the Bay of Fundy from Saint John back to Nova Scotia for another bite at the apple before ending in Halifax. We will probably have no airline difficulties at all and it will come off exactly as scheduled. This is supposed to be a form of adventure travel and I am prepared for whatever the gods of travel decide to throw at us. Then it occurred to me, what if the flight from San Diego to Toronto happens as scheduled (they do prefer to have their strike-idled planes on the ground in their home airport) and then they cancel the ongoing flight to Halifax? It’s 1,113 miles from the Toronto airport to Halifax, retracing the entire length of Lake Ontario and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. It is about a 16 hour ride by car. I guess if that happens, since we land in Toronto at 4pm, we will have to just rent a car and drive through the night and get into Halifax in the morning. That’s better than the nine-hour, 590 mile drive to Portland, Maine if we have to drive our way out of Nova Scotia at the back end. I guess there is always a workaround if the universe decides to test you to the max. Let’s just hope that lightning does not strike.