As part of our online travel supplement contributors and staff of the Fulcrum are sharing their adventures (and misadventures) at this year’s Canadian University Press (CUP) national conference (NASH). Check out what went down on day one.
I’ve always wanted to take a cross-Canada trip, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.
I was up at 4:45 a.m. today in order to get ready and go to the airport for our trip to Edmonton and so far I’ve made it as far as the University of Ottawa campus.
The Fulcrum editorial board, staff, and contributors are heading to Edmonton this week for NASH, an annual student journalism conference organized by the Canadian University Press (CUP).
We were supposed to leave early this morning, check in to our hotel, and get settled before seeing keynote speaker Robyn Doolittle this evening.
Instead, with flights backed up in Toronto due to the weather, Air Canada rescheduled us for one of the longest, craziest itineraries I’ve ever had: we’re taking a bus from the airport to Toronto this evening at 10 p.m., flying to Vancouver tomorrow at 6:50 a.m., then flying to Edmonton where one group of us will arrive at 5:40 and the other at 8:30.
While we waited for our flights to be rescheduled, we sat in the airport drinking coffee, playing the childhood game MASH, and watching the sun come up. We also spoke to reporters from CTV and CBC who were at the airport covering the delays Ottawa travellers are experiencing.
I know that no one controls the weather and it’s not that I’m not grateful to Air Canada for getting us to the conference, but I feel like we might be taking the most ridiculous possible route to Edmonton.
That said, many delegates from across the country are stranded in airports. CUP is working to live stream Robyn Doolittle’s keynote address this evening and those of us who had writing critiques scheduled for Thursday have had them rescheduled.
If nothing else, as our art director Tina Wallace said on the bus ride back to campus, “It’s all an adventure.”
