Flying in the 20^th century used to be a luxury.

Flying in the 21^st century, on the other hand, is a consumer-driven gateway to a vast and previously unexplored terrain of glitches and minor annoyances that cumulatively test one’s spirit and make one question the validity of human civilization.

So Air Canada promptly misplaced my bag, and I face the reckless prospect of being in Fort McMurray without my clothes. I hope they have a store where I can buy some, although I wonder what kind of clothes they’ll have… I may end up looking like a yuppie lumberjack-wannabe, but at least I’ll be warm.

It was a bleary-eyed ordeal this morning – my flight left Hartford at 6 am, which meant Alexis and I had to get up at 3 am in order for Alexis to drop me off at the airport on time. The flight from Hartford to Toronto was a two-hour beater on the smallest commercial propeller plane I’ve ever been on, a Beechcraft 1900D, with about 18 seats arranged one on each side and a narrow aisle running between them down nine rows:

There was no lavatory on the plane, and there was no in-flight service; the co-pilot rattled off the safety announcements before strapping himself in, and it was a small enough plane that the cockpit curtain remained open for most of the flight, giving me a good view of the pilots hunched over their cauldron of dials and gauges as they worked their arcane wizardry.

Wizardry that, apparently, did not extend to the ground crew. When the 17 other passengers and I clustered around the baggage services desk in Toronto after waiting for our bags for half-an-hour, we were told that the Hartford ground crew had “not loaded any bags on the aircraft.”

Having arrived on an international (“transborder”) flight, I had to first go through immigration and clear my bag through customs in Toronto before connecting on to Fort McMurray. Upon realizing that my bag and I would be forced to clear customs separately (sniff), I sprinted through the terminal to catch my next flight. When I got to the gate, Air Canada bumped me to First Class for the four-hour flight from Toronto to Fort McMurray, so that’s a plus! The plane is a comfortable Embraer E-190, which is surprisingly roomy, and larger than a Canadair Regional Jet.

So, as I sit in First Class, sipping my Sauvignon Blanc out of a real glass with the Canadian maple leaf etched on it, admiring my god-like view of the snowy vista rolling underneath, I guess I cannot really claim to be having a rough trip:

I do not get upgraded very often, in fact very rarely, but flying more than 60,000 miles in United economy over the past year has put me in a bracket where even Air Canada (a United partner) takes pity on me and grudgingly lets me rub my unwashed elbows with the snooty elite. I guess it makes up for the often misplaced bags, the frequent delayed connections and the resulting midnight flights to Iowa, and the grimly polite airline staff who make it clear that their number one responsibility is my safety, not necessarily my satisfactory flying experience. Sometimes I get the feeling they expect me to be thankful for being allowed to sit on their complimentary flotation device for four hours, instead of wondering, unreasonably, why my bag didn’t make it.