August 28, 2025
Day 9: Leipzig to Victoria
The mobility people at Leipzig airport turned out to be accurate with the amount of time they allocated to get us from the hotel to the gate. The airport is compact an manageable, so unlike Frankfurt and Charles de Gaulle. On the other hand, it's utilitarian and frankly ugly.
We were picked up by two very "sturdy" young women, who moved us along briskly in the wheelchairs. We found these women sort of inspiring. In North America we have the ethos for women of needing to be extremely thin, and we think those who aren't tend to be self conscious. But the body style in Eastern Germany and carrying on toward Russia has a higher mix of more square conformations. Our wheelchair jockeys were in a bit of an athletic occupation, but they were doing it more from the weightlifter point of view.
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As often happens with these transports, we got stashed in a holding area, before the journey would proceed. This gave a bit of a chance to look around. In our case, we observed people filing into what might have been an elevator, and I wondered where they were all going. But in fact they were packing into a smokers' corral, and really going nowhere!
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We got delivered right to the plane. At this point I was extremely unsteady on my feet, yet my vision had cleared. The cabin crew held my hands firmly and guided my down the aisle.
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On arrival at Frankfurt, it was never going to be a case of walking a stair ramp and out across a tarmac. Rather in this developed country, they brought up hydraulically raised equipment, and then transferred us into some kind of motorised transports.
We got parked for a bit opposite a welcome to Frankfurt poster. It shows well the River Main, and the modern city.
We next went on the typical rodeo through the mazes of the airport, and as usual, got stashed in various way stations. This was ok, but at one point we were looking at the clock and the boarding time an grew concerned that we could miss the flight to Vancouver. Dodie took the needed steps of prodding the mobility staff to get the show moving again. One staffer, clearly from Africa, said "There will be no mistakes, this is Germany!". He was, of course, correct.
Our itinerary next had a flight from Frankfurt to Montreal, still on Lufthansa. They had one of the larger Airbus models, with comfy seats and nice seat back entertainment screens. They also provided good pillows and blankets. The pillows are important for me. My tailbone just can't take the pressure of continual sitting, but with three pillows under there, it was ok.
The food offering was also quite OK. Several of the bits were very flavourful, and the chicken in the photo actually had some texture.
No fault of Lufthansa, but those are remakes of popular slightly older movies. And boy, they were stinkers. Why would Hollywood muck into the sacred grounds of Lilo and Stitch and Karate Kid!😢
At Montreal, the performance of the mobility people also merited kudos. We did have 6 hours or so of layover, removing any pressure. With this return to our native Montreal, it was natural to seek out some of our native food: Montreal Smoked Meat. What they had on offer was not exactly the "real thing", but was close enough, in the circumstances.
For Montreal to Victoria, the baton was passed from Lufthansa to Air Canada. Air Canada's Airbus must have been bought off a discount plane lot, as it had no screens, no charging ports, and uncomfortable seats. The company followed up with no food (or even water) offerings, except for a tray of something for sale that a staffer walked through with once. This flight was really torture for me, and I found it embarrassing that was our national airline, crossing our country on a major route.
Our daughter Laurie had driven up from Seattle, and she was there when the wheel chairs delivered us to our home airport.
Laurie also carried an encouraging card from granddaughter Violet:
We had been up and travelling about 30 hours. But it was not at all over.
We had come back to find medical help, so our destination was not home, immediately, but rather Victoria General Hospital. Victoria General Hospital (VGH). VGH is Victoria's "new" hospital, being just 40 years old. Compared to where we had been in Germany, it did not look good. Not that it was run down, really, just not as clean, neat, and orderly as the standard we had left. But significantly, there are the problems with staffing and organisation. After we had been in the urgent care department few hours, it became clear that they were not going to look at me for at least a further 10 hours. Sitting up for another 10 hours just could not happen, so we dragged on towards home.
Because my problem was clearly neurological, the quest was to find a neurologist, somewhere, somehow. AI identified the one and only properly specialized person on the Island, but how to get to see him?
This would have to be the quest for the next day.
(The next day has now already happened, so I am going to carry on with the story, on the next page.)
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