04. June 2022
Day 1: Travel day - Going to Vancouver
2022
This year we finally have our 3 months of holiday. This was initially planned for 2020, but then some strange virus happened… Then we thought about doing it in 2021. But everything was unclear in spring, no vaccination yet… so we delayed it to 2022!
So finally, after a really long wait, today is the day. Our rough itinerary is 1 month west Canada (Vancouver, Jasper, Banff), 1 month of USA (Yellowstone, Vegas, Yosemite, and more) and then 1 month of Hawaii! :)
For the first two months we plan to camp & hike quite a bit and therefore decided to bring the tent and sleeping bags. We will then send the camping stuff back and go only with carry-on luggage to Hawaii.
All my belonging for the next 3 months, missing is the sleeping bag and some small stuff
Way to Vancouver
First stop today is the Zurich (ZRH) Airport from which we fly to Amsterdam. There is a quick stop and then on to Vancouver. So far the theory…
Unfortunately KLM has some issues in Schiphol for quite some time and our initial flight was nearly 2 hours delayed. This has led to the fact that we have missed the flight. Thanks to the overall chaos at the Schiphol Airport, the queue for the rebooking service was around 4 hours…
In the past I had some positive experience with the KLM Twitter live chat, so I give it a try today. Better than waiting for endless hours in a slowly moving queue…
Paris it is!
It didn’t take long and we are rebooked to another flight to Vancouver, but with a stop in Paris. Initial departure of the Amsterdam -> Paris flight is 20:35 but it also got hit by some nice delays…
The waiting feels endless, we are sitting here, waiting for news or anything… And just hoping that this flight is not canceled as well. But in the end we are lucky, at around 23:20 we are in the air. And shortly after midnight we touch ground in Paris, neither of us thought that we would end up here today :)
As the connecting flight is at 10:00 tomorrow (or be more specific, later this day…), we go us a night at the CitizenM Hotel direct at the Airport. From here I’m not tiping this last words, after a nice fresh shower… Let’s hope that we make it to Vancouver today!
Note on the Rental Car
We book our rental car with Hertz quite some time in advanced and got a pretty good deal (2.5k for ~60 days). Due to the missed initial flight, we couldn’t make it in time to pick up the car. For that reason i got in touch with Hertz early (already in ZRH). But in the end they told me that if we can’t pick up the car today, we need to cancel and rebook for another date/location. This means that we will get back our 2.5k (YAY!) but need to pay around 10k now for a new reservation…. no words on that!