Day 22: Return to Vancouver (Sunday, September 11th)

 Just to let everyone know that we are now back in Vancouver.

We were scheduled to depart from Frankfurt Flughafen on our Air Canada flight for 10:15 am, but we departed about 90 minutes later. We were starting to pull from the gate and in fact a few minutes early when the plane stopped. The pilot came on to announce there was a medical emergency with a passenger and they needed to return to the gate. Medics and emergency personnel boarded the plane and apparently the passenger was taken off the plane. This all took a lot of time and then our plane missed its window to taxi to the runway.

We landed 90 minutes late. On getting close to customs there was a long queue of fellow passengers from our flight and other international flights as I guess downstairs was too busy to take us. Eventually we got downstairs and in front of a Nexus machine. Problems with the machine! Then on queuing up for customs with our declaration we kept on getting bumped from priority and waited a long time to see the officer. More questions about what we purchased in terms of wine and then told to go to the cashier.

Yup, we must have got a young guy as he was pretty much clueless. He needed his manager to help him and that was no improvement. It took a long time for them to figure out how many bottles, what size and then how much to charge us. Ridiculous! We repeated ourselves many times. These two made it way more complicated than it needed to be. We paid around $200CDN for our wine over and above the four bottles we are allowed to return with. That is a lot of money, but basically it is $12CDN extra for each of the 14 bottles over our limit. We cannot buy any of this wine in BC or Canada for that matter.

All is good as we are safely at home and none of our wine suffered any damage. All our checked in luggage showed up and we took the Canada Line back to our apartment. It is a warm day here, but super smoky. According to Google it is due to wildfires, woodlot blaze and a temperature inversion.

I took this photo (not a good one) of our eighteen (18) bottles of German Riesling. We will hold this wine in our wine fridge and drink sometime in a few years.