Hello faithful fam and friends, we are currently sitting in our hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We had one hell of a day getting up here! Both of us awoke early after a nearly sleepless night, and arrived at the airport to say our tearful goodbyes. The first leg of our journey was a flight to Montreal; smooth flyin'! However, upon arrival in Montreal, chaos ensued! We proceeded through customs to be confronted by confused customs agents. They had a bit of a difficult time understanding the reasons for our trip here (to get on a boat...). Rachael was selected to go through the extra immigration, but we failed to realize this until after we picked up our luggage (weighing a total of 200 pounds), which we dragged all the way to the end of a long hallway only to discover we had to turn around and go back. So we made our way, against the flow of human traffic to the immigration line, where Kiah waited with a pile of luggage while Rachael went through the line. By this point we had only 30 minutes till our plane boarded and the line was exceedingly long, with a bank of agents sitting around, while only one called "next!" As Kiah waited, Paul Giamatti walked past, muttering to himself and fiddling around with papers (he also waited in line with Rachael for immigration). When this fiasco ended, we again made our way down the hallway and proceeded out to go through security. We were directed to lane 7, which had only one other person in line. We soon realized that this was the "training" line, and it took us another 30 minutes to wait for our bags to come out of the x-ray and to have all of our purses, backpacks, computers, shoes, jackets, etc "strip searched", if you will. We finally escaped that line with only 5 minutes to spare, ran down the terminal, and reached the gate to be confronted by a gate agent shreiking at us, "Morkunas? Shapiro? Where have you been!!??" In any case, we got on the plane in the nick of time and arrived safely in Halifax. We spent the remainder of this afternoon checking in and exploring the area, finding a delicous italian pizza place for dinner. We are going to spend the rest of the evening lounging about and watching movies, anxiously awaiting our 10am arrival at the port. Come back soon to read about life on the boat!
Lots of love to everyone!
Kiah and Rachael