Halifax to Seattle, Thursday, 22-Jun-2023
/This was the day of the last leg of our trip. Unlike the flight to Halifax, this time we had daylight for the whole flight, so where there wasn’t cloud cover, we saw a lot of out the plane window.
We woke pretty early to leave for the airport. Unfortunately, it was too early to take advantage of the breakfast included with the room. We had bought a few things the night before to tide us over on the trip to the airport, so we ate while doing final packing.
Traffic was light, but considering the time of day, there were more cars than I thought there would be. We filled up the car a little way from the airport, then returned the car.
The first thing we did when we went to the terminal was to get the rest of breakfast. That done, we dropped off the checked bag, and headed to security. Melody breezed through, but I was randomly chosen for a hand swab. My laptop was also chosen to get swabbed. It was a quick process, so it didn’t add too much time.
We knew our connection in Vancouver would need to go smoothly, and our flight being late made us wonder how much time we were going to lose. After boarding, however, the pilot announced that we would arrive early, so that helped.
During takeoff, we got good views of Halifax and Nova Scotia as we gained altitude. I was a bit slow as we were going over Lake Superior, but did get it in a corner of a photo. We also saw the Missouri River, the Flathead National Forest (next to Glacier National Park, which was too close to the plane to really see), and Kootenay River and Lake. The skies were clear so we got good close-up views of the Vancouver area.
After landing, we headed towards U.S. immigration. There was another bag check that we needed to go through. It was run by the CATSA (Canadian TSA) so there were no lines for TSA Pre (or even Nexus). Melody once again breezed through, but my laptop and backpack were diverted for extra screening. Normally, that would have been fine, but there were a lot of items ahead of mine, and only two (or at times, one) people doing the secondary screening. The wait felt really long, considering our connection. Once it was my turn, however, things went quickly; they just needed to run the laptop through again to get a better image, and wanted to confirm that I had a camera in my backpack.
We did have a few extra minutes before our flight, so I grabbed a snack for us to have on the plane, and a few minutes after arriving at the gate, we were boarding. We got more great views of the Vancouver area, a whole-island view of Orcas, and a really good look at Seattle and Tacoma.
The bag was already waiting for me when we got down to baggage claim, and we didn’t have to wait long for either the train or the bus. Finally, we were home.