Leaving Calgary, flying home

September 5, 2012 - We had an early morning. We had scheduled our Hilton Garden Inn shuttle to the airport at 5:45am. They had one departing every 45 minutes. It was a bigger one than the van we had as a shuttle on arrival. That one held 9 passengers. This was like a small bus and probably held 15 passengers and had luggage racks behind the driver.

Since breakfast didn't start until 6am, they had out a table of coffee, hot tea and pastries by the elevator in the lobby. The driver was downstairs collecting people and luggage about 15 minutes early and as soon as he had collected everyone and their luggage, we left early. He took a different circuitous route to the airport, but even without any traffic at this hour it took close to 20 minutes to drive to the airport.

We went in and collected our customs forms and filled them out. There was a sign over the door to security/US Customs that announced when your flight could enter. Ours was pending when we arrived, so we had to sit a few minutes after filling out our forms. US Customs was not very busy though and they waved us up to enter early. We got through US Customs and YYC security fairly quickly even with some extra screening because they just weren't busy. We all had only carryon luggage so that speeded us on our way too. Once through security, we sat in the hall outside Tim Hortons while we waited for our departure gate to be posted. Clay wanted to buy a 40-piece box of TimBits to take into work tomorrow. He got some for himself and for Judy and Margie too. I ordered a Canadian Maple! Delicious! I filled my water bottles and we waited.

When we finally saw our departure gate get posted we made our way to it. Everything was pretty compact though, so it wasn't a problem.We said goodbye to Mom and Judy outside our departure gate at MSP, and they went on to theirs. Since it was lunch time, we grabbed a sandwich for Clay and a yogurt for me at a little deli outside our gate and ate while we waited to board.

Again, I think we had no problems with Delta. Flights were very full, but everything was on time and we all got home on schedule.

It was a good trip. Caravan does a good job overall and we think they provide a good value for our travel dollars. Uniformly, among our group the most popular and most recommended other Caravan Tour is what people called the Canadian Maritimes. I think it is this one, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We are thinking about going on this one next fall. We'll see what happens. Sorry it has taken me so long to get this posted! I will blame it on Clay getting sick as it was time to come home and me catching it from him 5 days later. We both got laid low by whatever cold/flu-like thing it was and it took us a long time to recover and regain any energy. So, I'm sorry! I hope it was worth the wait. It was a good trip and I would recommend Caravan's Canadian Rockies tour.