The family reunion went extremely well. Dr C was in a jovial, and more importantly, flush mood, so dinner for 10 was had at a landmark (ie overpriced but with ambience) prime rib restaurant…only seafood option…lobster. Wine flowed as we chatted, caught up with gossip and made plans for Christmas 06/Summer 07. D’s nieces had only just arrived as their flights were delayed and cancelled. Just like ours were as we headed to Toronto on Sunday afternoon. One gripe I have about US airlines, is the extremely bad service. The ground crew service is excellent most of the time, and I can understand their cheap, or rather non-existent on-flight service where food/drink has to be bought ala budget airlines. What I hate hate hate are the delays and cancellations. We only found out our flight to Toronto was cancelled after we were comfortably seated watching CNN in the lounge, with 30 minutes to go before boarding. No announcements….silence. I only discovered the problem on my way to top up my shortbread supply…ah yes, the rations in the lounges are equally dire. As we scrambled to get on an alternative flight we were told to rush to another terminal, to confirm our seats on another flight operated by another airline leaving 4 hours later than our original flight. This has happened to us many many times on United…lets not talk about missing luggage (which is hell when I have S’s diapers, formula and food packed in said missing luggage)…that we don’t even get angry anymore. We are resigned to, and have expected, atrocious service from US airlines for some time now. (I do acknowledge that I have not flown internally in ex Soviet Union, Africa or South America so I am sure there may be even worse airlines). Luckily we got our seat and waited it out in yet another lounge..this time they had carrot sticks…yay.

During our wait, D decided to change S’s diapers in the men’s loo. As I was reading my Sunday edition of the New York Times, I heard a blood curdling cry…which went on for quite a while (there were curious stares directed at men’s loo door) . I thought of checking up on D, but just as I was about to take a break from reading an extremely interesting article about tourism in Zimbabwe…a nice man came up to me and said “There is a lot of screaming, but everything is under control”. I continued reading and D and S came out a few minutes later…slightly teary, but diapered up. I would like to say that I had full confidence in D handling the situation…which I did, but I have to admit that I continued reading because I was more confident that had there been a problem, he would have been out of there is a flash seeking back-up support. And it was an interesting article…