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Travel disruption: a nostalgic trip back to freezing rain and 1994

This must be French soup. I'm sure if I'd shown it to anybody in the queue, they'd have had an official name for it. But I abandoned my community, my band of fellow-troopers, my slowly-shuffling Lodge of Travellers, leaving them back at the airport waiting fora "taxi voucher"-- leaving them in the hope of hamburger and a bed. Instead, French soup.

I base my diagnosis on the fact that the guy who gave it to me sounded French. Actually, I think he sounded more Irish than French, but in Montreal, anybody with a black bow tie behind the desk of a restaurant must be French. And he was sorry, but the Holiday Inn Point Claire doesn't have a 24 hour kitchen, and it closes at 11.00 pm. He did seem genuinely sorry, and he did get my soup, and he didn't charge me. Didn't even hint at a tip. So I suppose I have to accept that it's after 11.pm.

His honesty is all I really have to go on.

It is, by my watch, 4.35 am. By my internal body clock, it's supper time; in California it's about 8.30. I could be in a queue in California, too, I guess. Here in Canada, in the snow, there is no longer a queue; instead, I have a small ash-tray size bowl with aluminium foil, provided free; in it is French soup.

It's sort of green, with a yellow tinge, and reminds me of "fridge soup" which is, probably, just what it is. No, surely not; the Holiday Inn Pointe Claire wouldn't throw the scrapings into a pot and hot them up. It must be Real French Soup. Sitting on my bed, I eat it with the "Oakfield Farms" processed cheese segment I had the foresight to retrieve from the aircraft, plus two nicely sliced and warm segments of a baguette, a feast fit for a king; and free! No charge! At at $95 a night, I should hope so, too; tomorrow if the snow doesn't stop, it's the train for me. The queue didn't think that would work. I think it must work. I'll make up my mind in the morning.

Trouble is, not knowing what to do, I have this guilty feeling that I should have phoned Delrina, in Toronto, to tell them where I am. Absurd. Apart from the fact that they certainly aren't at work, and the compounding fracture in the logic that they didn't even give me the correct phone number for the hotel I should be checking into, I'm not entirely sure I know where I am myself. I have this vague feeling that Montreal is somewhat North and a lot West of Boston. And I sneaked a look at the map and decided that a train from here, going further West to Toronto, would take about as long as the train from Boston to New York. One of the queuers said it would take much longer than that, but he wants to go to New York.

At this point, the logic gets a little hard to justify; but that's all right, because there's nothing I can do about it. I mean, it's "freezing rain" in Toronto. What on earth is freezing rain, we asked in the queue, if it isn't snow? How can it be cold enough, down here, to freeze the rain, but warm enough up there to be falling as water? Concentrate, God, your reality simulation is out of synch. You did this to me in London last month, with snow falling at a temperature of five degrees.

All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not one of the people trapped in Toronto. Apparently the freezing rain looked as if it wouldn't go on long. So they held up a flight when the runway got slippery, but didn't stop sending planes out to join the queue. But not a nice, closely-knit, community queue like ours; a queue of planes. Apparently, they sat at the end of the runway for another half hour, dozens of them. Then they were told they couldn't take off, the airport was closing. And then they were told the taxiway was too slippery to taxi on.

Our Chief Steward told us in awed tones that some of them were sitting on the tarmac, stuck, and had been there for four hours. You really can't start a community in a queue of planes; you can't hear the person next to you for the noise of the engines, never mind the people in the fifth row forward.

But I've never taken the train from Boston to New York. I have taken a train from New London to New York, and it took just under three hours. I'd guess New London is roughly half way between Boston and the Rotten Apple. So make that just under six hours for the whole journey; if the Montreal-Toronto journey is a bit less, then I'd guess five hours -- and I was all for taking a sleeper train. Opinions in the queue differed as to whether there were genuine sleeper compartments, or just a very slow overnight train which you could sleep in when you passed out from fatigue.

And of course, if the freezing rain can stop the planes, what's to make the train immune? It's snowing like mad outside.

The logical thing to do, of course, would be to take the next plane to London. I've spent a week out here; Palm Springs (it snowed, believe it or not) in California, then San Diego (it was lovely and warm) then San Francisco. Well, not really San Francisco; it was San Jose, which isn't the same thing at all. But at least I could see the Golden Gate bridge as we took off this morning. So this is the end of the journey, and I might as well cut my losses and go home. Except I came all this way to meet Delrina in Toronto, and it seems kind of stupid to come to Montreal instead, and then take a plane home without even seeing Montreal, never mind the freezing rain in Toronto.

Tempers in the queue did get a bit ruffled, before I abandoned them. People were annoyed to find they'd stood on a salty floor for three hours just to discover they were getting nothing more than a taxi voucher.

But the man I really felt sorry for was the man the queue really got angry with.

He'd done a long day; he'd done his overtime, and he was due to finish working at the ticket desk at 8.pm. And then the Toronto travellers started showing up, and instead of going home to his French soup, he had to argue about which overbooked flight they wanted to be considered for, next morning, assuming the airport was open, and the destination airport too; he snapped.

He announced that he was going.

That left around 200 people in a queue, with only one official to process their taxi vouchers.

I don't feel equal to descrbing the scene that ensued. It spoiled the community spirit. I decided to get a cab to the nearest hotel, and here I am.

Travel broadens the mind, you see; I may be an outcast from my friendly little Queue Community, and I may feel that this isn't exactly "seeing" Montreal. But at least I have now learned about French soup.

I don't think I'll ask for the recipe, all the same...

[written in 1994 when weather rather more severe than today's London fog closed Toronto airport for the first time in its history, just as my plane was due to land