Tugboat's Texas Trip - Day 6, Dallas

Well, on Day 6 we once again woke up in Dallas. We should have been comfortably waking up in San Antonio for a final half day of comfortable living before leisurely making our way to the airport in good time and catching our flight home. But, as I said, Dallas. We had prepared what we could and made sure to rise early. We got to the Canada Consulate-General in Dallas over an hour before it opened. I should relay that neither of us really ate, we both felt nervous and stressed, facing the unknown can do that. Here is the scenario that we were facing that was causing us to feel that way. We have our original flight still booked, no extra cost. If we were going to miss that, we have an option out of Dallas for an additional $650 each (after our refund for cancelling the original flight in San Antonio) in the early evening OR we could pay only $383 extra for a flight the following day at 6:15am, also out of Dallas. I'm not sure what would happen in terms of the car, AVIS had been pretty cool so far, probably would have worked out with minimal additional cost, primarily since we picked up in Dallas and would be making their dreams come true by dropping off there. I could rant about the costs of different drop off fees but that's for later. The other consideration is that we'd need to stay another night in Dallas for the third option. The real rub is that to get our original flight, option 1, we'd have to make the four hour drive from the Consulate to the airport in San Antonio. That means that we'd have to have things wrapped up with our government before 11am to have a reasonable chance, as I mentioned in the last post. So we were stressed while we worried about that.

We really needed a muiracle here. The supervisor was in early and asked us why we there ahead of the opening time, and how we got in. The door was open when we got there man! He gave us a few additional forms we'd need to submit and asked us to start filling those out to hasten the process; we'd told him about our plight. Our caseworker arrived on time and we were getting interviewed shortly after the office officially opened. After a half hour of filling out forms, signing stuff in front of them, etc we were done on our end. She told us it would take 1-2 hours to process it and have authorization from Ottawa to print our emergency travel documents. We realized later that each form cost us around $50 to fill out. So $175 cost to kill our passports and get a one-pager to let us travel home. At this point we were feeling good, the timing felt good. We went downstairs as instructed and had a coffee and sat waiting to hear back from her. Time passed and we started to stress more. At 11am we went back up and sat worriedly in the lobby. We could hear her interviewing someone else. Not good! At 11:30am Chef conceded defeat and stepped into the hall to call the airline to change our arrangements. It wasn't a minute later that she saw me and said she had our papers! I dashed into the hall and yelped at Chef to hang it up, we're good! At 11:36am we took off running out of that office with our papers in hand. 

The drive was the most insane I'd ever been apart of. We used the Waze app to guide us for it's police detection as well as traffic avoidance. It was four straight hours of white knuckle hysteria. Chef drove, I won't tell you the speed range but it was necessary for me to be leaning forward keenly watching for police the entire four hours. We were told by the app that we'd arrive at 3:32pm initially for our 4:20pm flight. That is tight. At one point we'd trimmed it back to 3:27pm, still not ideal but better. We needed that five minutes because we got caught in three separate traffic snarls, including one in Austin that led me to spout off in a terrific string of violent cursing directed at the city of Austin in general. We also needed to obtain fuel at some point, both to satisfy the rental car people and also to actually make it the full distance. We decided that San Marcos was the place and we needed to be quick. Chef also had to rid himself of larger liquids in his luggage since we wouldn't have time to check baggage now. We planned that I would pump and he would dump. All in all it was six minutes from exit to re-entrance of the highway, an efficient pit. The app now said 3:37pm though. We got off the highway and it was going to be tight, we had to be perfect, like the Permian Panthers. That was when She called to check on us. Unbeknownst to her, Waze was in the process of delivering vital instruction about what fork to take and we both missed it. We took the wrong fork! Time to arrival jumped to 3:49pm, only 31 minutes before take-off. Not good! We drove even more dangerously. The highlight of which was at the rental car drop-off we had to navigate a winding, spiral ramp to the 5th level. We did this at a very high rate of speed, it was not good for us physically. We sped to the drop point and threw the key to the attendant and took off sprinting, hoping for help from somewhere. We ran past people on the escalator, jumped around people, it was like Home Alone. As we approached the security lineup, which was somewhat short, Chef took out his phone and tried to get his boarding pass up. He started to slow and I passed him and yelled for him to hurry. He had stopped and told me to look. We'd received an email around 2:25pm to tell us the flight was delayed until 6:45pm. We had out muiracle! Hilariously, that was about the time we stopped for gas. If he'd have taken a minute to check his phone we'd have had a different arrival to the airport, maybe even seen the riverwalk. As it turned out, we did see it.

Riverwalk mural at the San Antonio airport.

We had an easy time through security with our one pagers. We were even able to check our bags, guess he didn't need to toss all his expensive haircare product after all. We had a relaxing lunch and tried to calm down. We were both pretty wired still, actually very wired! Our gate changed and people grumbled about what a struggle that was, we just looked at each other and laughed. I haven't done a great job capturing the fear and stress of that drive here but even writing about it I'm feeling tighter and nervous. Thoughts about having to get a new rental car, changing flights and getting another hotel room start to flood back. We would have had to turn around and make the same drive we'd just done back to Dallas and wake up in the middle of the night for that 6:15am flight. And the costs! I don't want to dwell on it. We got back to Toronto, had some extra customs checks due to our weird documents but got out sooner than expected. After getting my bag and handing in my declaration form I walked through those doors into the terminal, officially back in Canada, my home and native land. It was a really sweet feeling. She met us some time later with my spare truck key and we were gone. I slept at their house as I had a meeting early nearby the next day. I fell asleep just ahead of 3am and woke up around half past six to get to my meeting. It took until later that day for me to finally calm down and lose the jittery feeling. I've told the story countless times and I don't expect I'll be forgetting any time soon. What a trip, some parts good, some parts less good. I know in the future I'll be guarding my passport a lot more closely. You should too.