I'm currently in Ottawa right now, but I arrived in Toronto on Wednesday morning and so begins a new chapter in the journey.

Because nothing in my life lately has been without it's share of drama, I'll fill you in on how the few hours leading up to the plane ride and afterwards were dramatic and nearly traumatic! (warning, it's fairly lengthy).

Firstly, I didn't finish packing until Tuesday morning around 2am or so (I'm a procrastinator....I can admit it!). Anywho Tuesday was jam packed right up until I was leaving. I drove my parents to work in the morning, went shopping for a router for a family member, set up said router at their house with enough time left to drive over to my Dad's work and then head to the airport.

I assumed that since I checked in online and only needed to drop off my baggage, things would be fairly smooth...I sure was wrong! There was a line-up with the airline I was flying with that was a good half-hour long wait. I made it up to the counter after waiting and as soon as I arrived to check in the bags, the power went out throughout the entire airport! Everything was out of commission for roughly a half-hour.

The power came back on and things appeared to be looking up:-) The only set back was that my flight was delayed an hour, which wasn't that big of a deal. Security took a quite a bit of time to clear through(also not a big deal, I had an hour to kill...)

Finally we were boarding the plane and on our way! However, the power outage had made the computers unhappy and they decided to overbook the flight and put more than two people to a seat. So musical chairs was going on in the plane for a good 15 minutes or so. Once things were sorted out, we were on our way! At least that's what I thought...

Due to severe weather in Toronto, we were going to be delayed another 45 minutes. 45 minutes escalated to another hour. That hour escalated to another hour. After sitting on the grounded plane for 3 solid hours I decided it was time to take a bit of a break and head back into the airport (we had this option after the first hour or so). As I'm heading over the bridge into the airport, one of the security guards was heading to the plane and asked if I had all my stuff. "No I don't, just my ID and boarding pass. Why do I need all my stuff?" "They just confirmed that this flight has been cancelled, you will need to grab all your stuff and head back to the terminal."

Fantastic! It was hard enough saying good-bye once and leaving Winnipeg and now the flight was cancelled. Sparing all the little details, I (along with the other 100 passengers or so), stood in a scattered line for an hour as we were individually booked on different flights leaving at different times. I ended up on a flight the same night (thank God) and that one actually made it off the ground!

When we touched down in Toronto, we had to wait on the tarmac for a half-hour so we could get a gate. At this point it's roughly midnight and I had been at the airport and in planes since 2pm; all I wanted to do was go to my aunts and crash anywhere my tired body wanted to. But that wouldn't be as exciting as my bag being left in Winnipeg and me waiting for it to come around the carousel but it never coming. Along with 40 or more other people, I had to wait in line (again) to schedule a delivery for my bag. Touching down at midnight, I finally made it into the car around 1:10 or so and I was on my way.


That experience probably would have been a prime time to exercise the Sermon on the Mount lifestyle....unfortunately my head wasn't in that space and I was pretty frustrated. I took it as a learning experience and hopefully I keep my cool next time something like this happens!

It wasn't all that bad though. With all the spare time, I met a bunch of really cool people and they became my airplane friends. We complained together(lol) and talked about our future goals and what was taking us to Toronto. They all had awesome dreams/aspirations and good head's on their shoulders. Because the whole ordeal was rather comical, movie-like and ridiculous, we all had a good laugh about it, which made things better:-)

Anywho, I took my placement test at my school on Thursday morning, hung out with the family until this morning, and now I'm in Ottawa and they (Toronto family) are in Cuba! So this is just time to collect my thoughts and to get back on track before school starts. The chapter is just beginning and it's come in with a mighty bang. I speak Grace Grace to myself in hopes of this being another step in the right direction of living in His will for my life. I'll hopefully be blogging frequently (since I have no friends out here and it's just school and work for me haha!) I promised my friend Shane I'd have at least one monthly Geek Post, so if you see them, don't be alarmed.

I'm curious to see where I'll be heading in the next little while. However, I know that God knows and that He'll never stretch me beyond what I can handle.

Let the good times roll. Keep on keeping on!

Blessings!