Thinking Allowed: This one is for Alan

While the decision to return to Australia at this unstable moment in time required some effort, the actual journey back to Australia was far more arduous than we expected. Gone are the days of booking an airplane ticket, showing up at the airport, and boarding your long haul flight. In place we are left with flight changes, route closures, hours with ticketing agents, country closures, transit requirements, masks, long trips made longer, quarantines, and a general losing effort to maintain composure while navigating a slowly collapsing air travel system. We booked tickets in May during a period when Air Canada hopefully reopened routes to Australia for July. With each cancellation and reroute our trip got longer - 27 hours to 30 hours to 38 hours and finally to 60 hours involving an overnight layover and two overnight flights. The final leg of our flight was cancelled mid trip twice. I get heart palpitations just thinking about our hours spent in airports and on the phone with agents. Not even secret agents at that. The 60 hour journey was a breeze in comparison to the lead up. But here we are now. By here I mean a hotel room- but- it is a hotel room in Sydney - which is in Australia. And the success of our trip is largely due to Alan.

We showed up at the Cathay counter in Vancouver less than happy. The staff looked overwhelmed and Alan came over to receive less than happy comments from us - haggard stressed looking adults with a trail of cute kids. More angry customers. While he tried to use all those techniques to make us go away we were persistent and our straggly family brought out the compassionate part of him. So Alan took us on as a project. Alan called officials in Australia and called officials in Hong Kong. Alan told our sad story to lots of officials in the hopes of getting exceptions made for us (only 50 passengers are allowed on each Australia bound flight). Alan even walked over to the Air Canada desk himself (I assure you this is a big thing). Alan was kind. And even if things didn't work out I appreciated the kindness. Alan came into the airport the next morning on his day off to continue to pull strings on our behalf. In the morning he asked if I slept alright and when I shrugged and said 'no' he looked bashful and said he was so stressed for us he had to take sleeping pills to sleep. When Air Canada wanted to prevent us from leaving Vancouver anyhow (they incurred large fines if we got stuck in Hong Kong) Alan advocated for us. Alan did sneaky things like logging on to the computer as if he was in Hong Kong to manage to print our boarding passes. Alan arranged for an agent to meet us in Hong Kong- may have even been a secret agent. Alan was an awfully decent and creative man. I have no doubt that we would not have made it to Australia without Alan. So when pandemics bog us down let us all take a breath and try to be like Alan.