Lost Luggage & Emergency Landings

    Taken with Holga Camera

We went away for the New Year and the holidays were great apart from the actual travel aspect of things. The airports were crowded, of course. We didn't expect otherwise. My luggage did not arrive with me. Don't know where my bag wound up traveling to, but we were tearfully reunited a day later. On the return trip, We were departing in pretty icy and snowy conditions but the trip began uneventfully enough. Once in the air though, the plane was unable to climb to altitude. Turbulence was pretty significant. After about twenty minutes in the air, the plane was turned around and began its return trip to the original airport in Montreal where the landing was normal enough. We didn't stick around long enough to find out what actually happened to the plane because we had at this point missed our connection and needed to figure out where we were going to spend an extra night in Montreal. So, even though it lacked the dynamic sense of crisis, this was my first, and hopefully last, emergency landing. The next day, we just about missed a connection in LaGuardia as well, which is a thoroughly screwed up place to be in a hurry. Next year, I am going to think long and hard about buying the DVD of our vacation and staying at home...

Anyway, I also had an equipment screwup which goofed with a couple of rolls of film. I was messing with a flash and bulb exposures but did not return my Holga to shutter for a couple of rolls. And unfortunately there were not many happy accidents on the blur side. The image above is of Walker at the beginning of a dogsledding trip we took in the Laurentians. His expression pretty much tells the story. Very cool trip. Bitter cold in fact. Three hours along the river. Hot chocolate, coffee, cookies... As a rule, memories are somewhat warmer than reality, but all the BS related to travel still seems actually worth the hassles. I think. Yeah.