YUL at Yuletide

Vacations have a way of doing that - making you a temporarily aimless, jobless drifter. Except with lots of carb intake and bad TV. And I'm mostly just drifting from my bed to the fridge, to the couch. But now it's back to work and early mornings and the beginning of a brand new decade.

Like a lot of you, I traveled for the holidays. Scott and I visited my hometown of Timmins, Ontario. It's a 10-hour drive at the best of times and flying there is so expensive, it rivals the cost of a trip somewhere tropical. But hey, why go somewhere sunny when you can go from cold to colder? At its peak, Timmins had a daytime high of -30. (Global warming, my arse!) So, I cashed in all my travel points and we flew northward.

Aside: Yes, Timmins has an airport. It's small but busy and a central hub for travel through the north. Here's my favourite thing about the airport there: there are separate "Arrivals" and "Departures" entrances outside. It doesn't matter which one you go in, you end up in the same room. Adorable? Yes.

If you’ve spent time in airports, you know you can always count on surly shopkeepers and overpriced everythings. I usually end up paying too much for a bottle of water and an armload of magazines. The kind of magazines I'd never read anywhere else but in a grocery checkout line or on a plane. The tabloid rags. The Hollywood tattlers. The Cosmo mag with the perpetual screaming headline, "Discover His New Secret Sex Spot!" (This, by the way, is the same headline they've recycled in some form or another over the decades. They're just checking off body parts alphabetically 'til they get to 'z'. I think they're on "uvula" now).

Can’t beat the crowd-watching at airports – people at various points of travel. There are planes barfing out sun-kissed passengers from tropical climes, planes inhaling folks for long hauls. Some people look stressed, others seem excited to be leaving somewhere fun. There are parents with screaming kids in tow (please don't sit behind me, please don't sit behind me), business people with power suits and i-phones, old people getting a lift in the airport shuttle, beeping it's presence down the halls.

And then at some point you're crammed into a giant tin can with these people and up you go, to fight for the arm rest at 30,000 feet.

With so little free perks onboard, I like that they sometimes offer you a newspaper. But have you ever tried to read one from the middle seat? I also dig the personal TV option (Toronto is 539 km from Montreal or 2 episodes of 30 Rock) - but did you know you have to PAY for headphones now?

Anyway, we're back home now where the snacks are better and the bathroom doesn't wobble. We even wrapped up our travel time with a few days of vacation to spare (to drift from bed to fridge to couch). Here's hoping you made it through peak travel season relatively unscathed. Now, to start collecting those travel points again....