Bouchercon2025 – The PolyBlog

I’ve always wanted to go to Bouchercon, all the way back into the late ’90s and I was in various writers groups online. It just never seemed worth it enough, as my writing hobby is mostly blogging and will be so until I retire and have more time to devote to it. And even then, there are a bunch of non-ficiton pieces at the top of the writing to do list.

But I’ve trying to think ahead, “prep” my retirement, and this year’s Bouchercon is in New Orleans. The Big Easy. And a destination that has long been on my bucket list. I pulled the trigger back in late Spring and registered, booked flights and reserved the hotel. I was in.

I was trying to keep the arrangements simple, and I booked with Air Canada from Ottawa to Chicago, and then Chicago to New Orleans. On the return, I had the same connection. There were options through Toronto and Washington, but Washington’s times were odd, and for Toronto, I wouldn’t clear customs until Toronto. If I went Ottawa to Chicago, I could clear customs in Ottawa. All good.

Almost immediately, Air Canada threw me to the wolves. Within days of the booking, they changed the time of my outbound flight by a few minutes and my return, plus switched me entirely to United and United Express. There was a small tweak to one of the elements, something with baggage or seat bookings, as I recall so in effect, they changed the price. Other than the days and the routings, everything changed. No big deal. I had a 4 hour layover in Chicago that I wasn’t too happy about, but whatever.

I just got back from another trip with the family to BC. I couldn’t worry about the New Orleans one too much in advance, other than to plan to do it only with a single carry-on rather than checking any luggage.

This past week, I got the Air Canada app set up with Andrea’s help, and my stress started to rise. It is a REALLY long time since I travelled on my own on a plane. So long in fact, I can’t even reliably think of when it was. I think it was before Jacob was born, come to think of it. Wow.

Anyway.

So the app was flagging things all over the place about my flights. Namely that there had been multiple changes to the flight times. Which I knew and didn’t worry about. And the app didn’t like them. They wanted me to log into my Air Canada account and accept the changes. Except there was no place I could find to say, “Yep, all good.” Whatever, I wasn’t complaining about them, I was fine with them.

Except when I went to check in to my flights on Sunday, Air Canada said “Nope, you have to check in on United”. Okay. When I pulled it up on United, it said, “Hey, we can’t pull up your reservation as there are duplicate flights. If you booked with a travel agency, call them; if not, call us.” Except it wasn’t really “call them” so much as try chatting with them.

I tried chatting. It’s an AI-driven virtual assistant at the start, asking me for my confirmation number, my eticket number and my last name. Only to tell me that I should checkin online or use their app. I had to tell it to transfer me to an agent three times before it did. Then 20 minutes online for them to tell me they couldn’t do anything, talk to Air Canada.

Sigh.

Called Air Canada, and actually made it to a real person in about five minutes. Nice. Okay, so they go through, tell me about all the flight changes since I booked, I say yes, they finalize it all, shows up in my app all perfect, no flags. So I should be able to check in with United immediately.

Nope. Same problem. I fought through chat agent algorithms and eventually got to a live body who basically told me that I should contact the travel agency “Air Canada” and get them to reissue the ticket.

In United’s defense, they were showing my return at 10:25 a.m. even though Air Canada was showing 9:40 a.m. So legitimately, it wasn’t lining up.

I called Air Canada and got Nick. Bear in mind that I am now less than 18 hours from boarding and in the midst of packing. Nick couldn’t solve it, and he even reluctantly called United to work it out between them. They couldn’t fix it. But he assured me that if I went to the airport on Monday, they could fix it at the airport manually.

Yeah, I’ve read lots of posts online from people who had VERY SIMILAR problems and lo and behold, it was not easy to fix manually at the airport nor even clear if Go Jet, United, or Air Canada was the one to fix it. AC told me United; United told me AC.

My stress has entered the chat

I was not wanting to go to the airport in the hope they could work it out. It would have just stressed the absolute f*** out of me. So I got to thinking.

Weren’t there OTHER flights that I had not chosen because of routing, times or whatever?

“Hey, look, Nick. I see there is an early morning option to fly AC-only through Toronto to New Orleans. And similarly coming home.”

Yep, he saw it. And since he could treat it as a schedule change, he could rebook me all the way through the trip on AC only. Done. Goodbye United.

Oh f***. I was leaving at 6:00 now, meaning up at 4:00, at the airport for 4:45 a.m. Crap. Well, sleep was overrated. I made it, everything went swimmingly in Ottawa. Interestingly, there was a flight to Toronto that left while I was in the gate area and nobody asked us if we wanted to go early (they did for ours as there was lots of room). I thought about asking, give me more time in Toronto to make a change, but nah, it’ll be fine, right????

I got to Toronto, my new departure was also in Terminal 1, all good, right? RIGHT????

Right, 90 minutes between flights. With walking a mile or two it seemed to get to security, where they decided that we were doing FULL security without any of the bells and whistles that makes it easy at Ottawa now. No, this was old school. Shoes off, laptops out of their bag, CPAP machine out of its bag, separate bin for my carry on, etc. I had 5 bins go through the scanners and then it took me almost 10 minutes to reassemble everything back to where it needed to be. I am NOT looking forward to the return, but I’ve got way more time.

Then I had to clear customs who wanted to know why a government guy was going to a writing conference without a business visa. HOBBY was the key word they were looking for, fyi.

Then 12 more corridors and I really NEEDED a bathroom. No choice at that point.

Got to the gate finally, second last one to board — which was stressful except for the fact the flight was half-empty. So they had boarded REALLY fast. After takeoff, I moved back about 10 rows, nobody in front of me or behind me, easy to recline seats, spread out on the seats beside me, etc. It was great. We also picked up tail wind or something, and we arrived at least 30 minutes earlier than expected.

I texted Andrea as I finished various “stages” and sent some early pics of the Big Easy on landing.

Then a VERY long trip through the New Orleans airport to get to the exit, with another bathroom stop, only to find out that apparently NOLA doesn’t like taxis??? There were about 10 different signs up for various types of transport from the airport, with NO indication at the first 9 where taxis might be. But I found one, $40 and 25 minutes later, with a swing by the Superdome, and I was at the hotel.

Then I got a really nice surprise. I was supposed to get here around 7:00 p.m. at night, but I was now here at noon. I arrived at the hotel a few minutes before but there were a couple of guests ahead. I assumed I’d have to drop my bag and go wander, but no, they had a room of my type available. Sweet. By 12:15 p.m., I was in my room, and unpacked even. Seven hours ahead of schedule.