We got into Vancouver three hours late (traffic jam in Heathrow’s take off lanes, as usual), missed our flights to Victoria, and then had to wait TWO HOURS beside the luggage carrousel waiting for our absent luggage which was first stuck behind a jammed cargo door (turned out it was frozen shut) and then when the ground crew finally got the door open they realized that all the cargo bins in the aircraft’s hold were also frozen shut so had to cut them open like sardine cans with metal cutters to get the luggage out. The BA staff said they had never seen or heard of this happening before, but I HAD noticed flying over Greenland that the outside temperature reading was hovering around -76 degrees Celsius.
Anyhoo – by some Christmas miracle managed to catch the very last flight over to Victoria which left at midnight, and arrived in Victoria after 28 hours of solid travel and less than 1 hour of sleep to be told by my parents that they had been without electricity since noon that day due to a huge winter storm that had knocked out the power lines.