Today begin my Sapmi adventure. Chris took a half day off work and drive me through bumper to bumper Chicago traffic to get me to O'Hare and my flight to Reykjavik.
Or, Toronto. That was the problem, it seems. We went to the international terminal #5, and no one had heard of Icelandair. And, no one at Icelandair had heard of marking on my itinerary that my first flight was with American Eagle.
We got to the right terminal at the end, and the right gate. I've boarded now.
The plane before ours at the gate was a bit delayed, so that meant we were, too. Once we all boarded, a wall of black clouds were upon us. We all de-planed.
O'Hare wall of storm
Then, we re-planed and were grounded. Then, we made it into the queue for take-off. At that point, our flight was cancelled.
O'Hare is kind of crazy when a couple hour of flights have been cancelled. We all scrambled to get rescheduled. I managed to be one of those chosen to make it out that night. Unfortunately, my connecting flight had already left for Iceland, so I got to spend a day in Toronto.
Having attended university in Canada, I have a deep appreciation for all things Canadian. I used my day there to travel downtown and FINALLY see paintings by the Group of Seven. Perhaps the most famous painting by Tom Thomson, West Wind, was not on display currently, but his preliminary painting for it was.
The Art Gallery of Ontario also had a special showing of Ai Weiwei's art. Wow. Totally worth seeing. I was very impressed with his woodworking, craftmanship and overall view of life as seen through an artist's eyes.
