Emigration Valentine style
I married a Canadian, which means I got the choice to carry on living in the UK, or up sticks and move to Canada. After nanoseconds of thought, I decided to emigrate to Canada.

So after filling in the forms, submitting various bodily fluids for testing, paying who knows how much money, and then waiting almost a year, I had my permanent visa approved. So we sold the house and booked our one-way flight to Canada.

We were flying out on Valetines Day, which was the first Saturday of half term that year. We checked out of the hotel [Another long story, but never, ever stay at the Radisson at Heathrow] and somehow got a cab despite the hotel's attempts to keep us from being on time. Heathrow was packed (half term, remember?), and it took over an hour just to get inside the terminal - the queues were that long. This despite us arriving three hours before take off, like the good little travellers we are.

We'd booked World Traveller Plus for a couple of hundred quid extra, which means you get an extra peanut or something, rather than the usual cattle-class World Traveller. Hey, we're leaving the country for good, so why not splash out a bit? Anyway, we finally get to the check-in desk about 45 mins before the flight, and we're told that we were lucky - we were being bumped to business class. Yes! We were so excited, but we didn't have long to celebrate as it took 30 mins to get through security - so any duty free shopping had to be done at top speed.

I was feeling pumped about being upgraded, about leaving the litter-strewn land of my birth, about it being Valentine's Day, about having a few grand in the bank after selling the house ... So I decided to buy the wife a ring. A really, really expensive ring. We headed for the high-falootin' jewelery shop, and I asked wifey to pick out the ring she liked best. We settled on one that came to a couple of quid less than a grand, so I waved the Visa card and the sales assistant went into the back to call the credit card company.

It took ages, and I was getting worried that we'd miss the flight. After lots of too-ing and fro-ing, and me talking to Visa and telling them my mum's inside leg measurement or whatever passes for a security test, they finally let us go, the ring having been well and truly paid for.

We run like maniacs to the gate, slap down the boarding passes, and wheeze that we've been bumped to business class, and sorry we're late.

"Oh noes!", says the airline chick, "you're not in business class at all!!11!!1oneone!1!".

I wept silently for a split second, until she added "you've been further upgraded to first class".

Bottom line - we flew first class (free shampers & Belgian choccies, and horizontal bed-sized seats) on our way out of the UK, my wife got a sparkly multi-diamond platinum ring, and my life in a new continent started on a high.

Of course when we landed and it was minus 40 and three feet of snow, but twas a grand day.
( gfreeman is only here for the beer, Fri 3 Mar 2006, 18:35, Reply)