Day 7 - Saturday December 21, 2013:

First thing today, I must book a courtesy suite for us four before our flight leaves.  This could be one of our existing suites or another room.  The reason is that we would normally have to check out of the hotel by 11:00 am, but the bus doesn’t leave for the airport from the hotel until I guess about 5:15 or 5:30 pm and we’ll need a room / suite to stay in till that time.  It’ll probably cost us about $100US.  We need to be at the airport in time to check in our baggage, go through customs, and maybe get something to eat or drink and wait to board the plane.  In order to board the plane, we must have boarding passes.  We can’t print them out here at the hotel, so we will have to pick them up at the airport instead.

Today, we are more than happy to be leaving!  At least, Brent, James and Dave are…..I love Jamaica though and I will be returning back here sometime!  We could not book a courtesy suite or room for today at all because the hotel was fully booked.  So, we had to check out of our two suites by 11:00 am and stow our baggage down by the front desk in the main lobby.  We were still allowed to use the nearby change rooms, locker facilities, showers and washrooms, but there was no longer any hotel room/suite for us.  At about 5:00 pm, we were picked up (after showering and changing) by our bus so that we could go to the airport and get on our WestJet flight home. 

The flight home was pretty uneventful, but by the time we got back to Toronto almost 4 hours later, we discovered that a horrific ice storm was brewing in the GTA and Durham Region where we live.  Kyle had agreed to pick us up after we’d gone through customs and picked up our baggage.  He was there waiting for us when we got outside Terminal 3 at around 1:00 am.  The drive home was tricky because it was pretty icy by this time.  Then, about an hour after Dave and I got home – we got home just after 2:00 am or so – the power went out all over the GTA and Durham Region and we did not have any idea when it would come back on!  The same thing happened to Brent and James when they got to their home in Oshawa shortly after us.  This has been our collective nightmare since very early on the morning of December 22^nd.

Post-vacation - Sunday December 22, 2013:

Two nights after landing in Toronto, we still did not have power or heat and it was getting too cold to stay home any longer.  Finally, on Monday December 23^rd, we booked ourselves into a local hotel, the Comfort Inn in Oshawa.  Kyle and Cathy took his two girls, Kaylee and Jaime, up to see their grandmother, Trudy, in Innisfil, Ontario for Christmas and Boxing Day.  Meanwhile, Dave and I had to stay in the Comfort Inn and keep booking more nights as we got news updates from the CP24 TV channel on the power outage situation.  For some unknown reason, our hotel was not affected by a power outage until Thursday December 26^th.  This is, by far, the longest and most severe power outage I have ever experienced! 

The last time I experienced a power outage (blackout) in the GTA was in 2004 or 2005 when I lived in East Scarborough and that time, it lasted about 22 hours.  But, that time was also different because it happened in the summer….we weren’t living in sub-zero temperatures at home then!  Our frozen food at that time had almost started to thaw, but thankfully, the power came back on just before there was any irreversible loss. This time, however, we’ve lost all of our frozen food because you cannot re-freeze it once it starts thawing right out.  So now, it’s all garbage and we’ll have to start all over again shopping for meat and frozen vegetables, etc. 

I really do hope that my home insurance will cover our frozen food losses and our hotel bills for this week.  I am still here, sleeping at the Comfort Inn for the 4^th night this week!  Dave went back to our place tonight (Thursday) to check out the situation for the 2^nd time today and he decided to stay overnight because the power has finally come back on at home.  It’s still cold there, but he thinks he can handle it.  It’s costing me a lot more this month because we’ve had to eat out much more often and Christmas time is expensive and the hotel bills are definitely piling up.  We’ve all been told by CP24 that the power outages should be fixed soon and hopefully, that fact is now coming true!  It’s about f**king time!

Today, we finally did our laundry from our Jamaica trip and from the last week.  That, at least, is a relief. 

Tonight, I am ordering in a pizza for myself for dinner.  It’s pizza for the second time this week.  It’s certainly been weird this week because, for Christmas dinner on Christmas Day, we had dinner at Boston Pizza and I’d ordered a Hawaiian pizza then.  Oh well, it’s a strange world, isn’t it?