beyondthesnowdotblog

You know how every travel day has its own personality? Some glide along so smoothly you barely notice them happening. Others—well, they decide to be unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. My first day heading from Montreal to Mérida was definitely in the second category. And honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing about it.

Here’s how the day was supposed to go: wake up on September 23rd, do a final bag check, convince myself I’d remembered everything (spoiler: I hadn’t), head to the airport at a perfectly reasonable hour, board a flight, and land somewhere warm with the confidence of someone who definitely has her life together. Simple. Clean. The kind of plan that looks good on paper.

Instead, the day turned into one long, hilarious comedy of delays, forgotten items, airport confusion, missing sunglasses, and one absolutely shocking taxi bill. But I made it to Mérida, I climbed into that cab to my Airbnb, and I was there. Tired, slightly disoriented, and laughing at how quickly travel can humble you—but there.

Before the wheels fell off: getting ready.

The original plan was to leave Montreal on September 22nd. That was the clean version. The sensible version. The one where you wake up early, triple-check your bag, and head to the airport feeling like you have it all figured out.

Then AeroMéxico sent me an email.

The flight was being delayed to 3:00 pm.

Now, a 3:00 pm flight doesn’t sound catastrophic at first. You tell yourself things like “Well, that’s annoying, but at least the day still feels salvageable.” You start doing mental math about timing and think maybe—just maybe—this extra time could work in your favor:

• More time to include or discard items in my backpack
• More time to finish my 2nd assessment on the TEFL certificate
• More time to make sure the apartment is locked up
• More time to pretend I’m not already stressed

The thing about flight delays is that they’re rarely just one problem. They cascade. Suddenly everything else has to shuffle around them. Your ride changes. You get hungry at weird times. Your energy peaks when it absolutely shouldn’t. And your brain starts doing math it has no business doing: If the flight is now at 3:00 pm, and boarding is usually two hours before, and traffic on a Thursday is… well, you get the picture. It’s enough to make anyone’s eye twitch a little.

Do I still leave early? Do I wait it out? What time is boarding actually happening? And why do airline emails manage to create more questions than answers?

Before I could spiral too much, AeroMéxico offered a solution: change the flight to the next morning at 9:30 am.

And you know what? A morning flight started sounding pretty good. Morning flights have this hopeful quality to them. You imagine yourself arriving fresher, more organized, like the kind of person who travels with matching luggage and never misplaces anything. (Spoiler alert: I am definitely not that person.)

So I changed my plans. September 22nd became a false start, and September 23rd became the real departure day.

Or so I thought.

Getting to the airport: the great transportation puzzle

My original plan to get to the airport was very Montreal. Very practical. Very me trying to be economical and clever: ferry, metro, bus. Three steps, easy connections, and it felt charmingly urban. After all, I do have the time to do these things now.

On paper, it looked great. A little multi-step public transit adventure before heading to Mexico. Very economical. Very “I’ve got this under control.”

Then reality had other ideas.

When you’re already a bit wound up about travel, a three-part transportation plan stops looking like a route and starts looking like an obstacle course. The ferry timing. The metro transfers. The bus schedule. My backpack. The weather. The possibility of one tiny delay cascading into a full airport panic spiral. It all suddenly felt like too much.

So I made a decision.

I called a taxi instead.

A $120 taxi.

I’m not going to pretend that number didn’t sting. It did. There’s something about paying $120 for a ride to the airport that makes you suddenly nostalgic for every cheaper option you could have taken. The ferry started to seem romantic in hindsight, but it wasn’t operating at the time I needed it. The bus sounded noble and thrifty, but I’d still need to get to the metro station somehow—which meant a taxi anyway. And the ferry doesn’t start running until 6:30 am. I did the math. The taxi won.

But here’s the thing: that expensive taxi also bought me something my original plan didn’t have.

Peace. No transfers. No hauling myself and my backpack across Montreal, through the metro, and onto a bus. No stress-refreshing the transit app with one eye twitching. Just a comfortable seat, a window, and the quiet realization that sometimes you have to spend a little money to buy back your sanity.

The ride itself was calm and quiet. Montreal slipped past the window while my brain did what it does best on travel days: mentally inventory every possible thing I might have forgotten.

Passport? Yes.

Wallet? Yes.

Phone? Yes.

Charger? Um…

That question would become very important in about twenty minutes.

Sometimes expensive peace is exactly what you need.

Inside the airport: where normal people forget how to function

Airports have this special superpower: they make normal, functioning adults forget how to do ordinary things. You can be perfectly competent in real life, but the moment you walk through those doors, your brain goes sideways. You check your boarding pass fourteen times. You look at the departure screen, leave, panic, and come back to look at the exact same screen again. You ask yourself questions you already know the answers to.

Welcome to my airport experience that day.

First item of business: my sunglasses disappeared.

One minute I had them. The next minute, I didn’t. That’s the entire story, which is also the most annoying kind of story because there’s no drama to it. No cinematic moment where I watch them fall. No heroic rescue attempt from a conveyor belt. They just… vanished.

I retraced my steps. I checked my bag. I questioned reality. I did the classic airport moves where you pat down every pocket, open every compartment in my backpack as if my Costco bought Serengeti sunglasses 😭might somehow compress themselves into my jacket lining or jump into my backpack.

Nothing. They were just gone, apparently staying behind in Montreal as some kind of souvenir.

But losing the sunglasses was just the opening act.

As I was walking through the airport, doing a mental inventory of my backpack, I realized I’d forgotten a couple of rather essential items. A charger. A mouse. The usual things that don’t seem critical until you absolutely need them.

A forgotten charger is one of those travel mishaps that transforms into the most important thing in the world. Suddenly it matters more than your sandals, your toiletries, even the sunglasses (rest in peace). Without a charger, your phone battery becomes a countdown clock. Every message feels expensive. Every photo feels irresponsible. Every time you check your screen, you can almost hear your battery whispering, “Are you absolutely sure?”

Not ideal when you’re about to be in a new country.

The mouse was less urgent, but it had that particular sting of being small enough to forget but useful enough to miss right away.

So there I was, at the airport, sunglasses-less, charger-less, and mouse-less, trying my very best to maintain the illusion that I’m a prepared and organized traveler.

Spoiler: I’m not.

I was just a woman with a passport, a backpack, and the hope that everything else would somehow work itself out.

So I did what anyone would do: I bought a mouse and a charger for $100. I think that’s where I also accidentally left my good Serengeti sunglasses. Such is travel.

Boarding time: the art of airport confusion.

Then came the boarding situation. Or what I like to call “the time travel stopped making sense.”

The flight was supposed to board at 9:30 am. Or so I thought. But then the screen said something different. Then an announcement came that seemed to imply yet another timeline. The overall vibe was: “Yes, something is definitely happening here, but nobody, including me, is completely sure when.”

And that’s when I realized: Mexican time had arrived early. It showed up right there at the Montreal airport, about eight hours before I even left Canada.

And I mean that with love.

There’s a particular kind of humor you have to tap into when traveling. You can stare at the boarding screen all you want. You can refresh the airline app obsessively. You can look around at other passengers hoping someone else understands what’s happening. But eventually, you realize the plane will board when it boards. Not when your anxious little schedule says it should. When it’s ready.

So I stopped fighting it and just watched the airport theater unfold.

People started lining up. Then not lining up. Then forming that weird half-line that only exists at airport gates, where everyone pretends to be casual while secretly defending their position with intense focus.

There’s always that moment at the gate where nobody wants to be first (too eager) but nobody wants to be last (too late). So everyone hovers. Bags shift. Passports appear. Phones come out. People stare at the gate agent like they’re reading tea leaves, trying to discern some hidden message about when boarding will actually start.

I was observing all of this and chuckling to myself.

I checked the time. I checked the gate. I checked my boarding pass. I checked the people around me. When someone moved, I wondered if I should move. When someone sat back down, I wondered if I’d misunderstood everything. It was ridiculous. It was completely ridiculous. And it was exactly what I needed to calm down about.

The more confusing it got, the more I leaned into the absurdity. After everything that had happened already—the delay, the changed flight, the expensive taxi, the lost sunglasses, the forgotten charger—what else could I do but laugh?

At some point, travel asks you to surrender. Not in a defeated way, but in a “fine, I guess this is my life now” kind of way.

And then, finally, the line became real.

The gate agent eventually called passengers forward, and all that vague airport uncertainty hardened into an actual boarding process. Bags rolled. Passports came out. People moved with that mix of relief and impatience that only happens when a flight is finally, actually, for real boarding.

There’s something wonderfully satisfying about getting on the plane after a messy lead-up. Even when you’re tired. Even when you forgot your charger. Even when your sunglasses have apparently decided to stay in Montreal forever.

The plane door feels like a reset button. Once I sat down, I could feel the whole morning finally catch up with me. The decision to change flights. The ride to the airport. The mental checklist. The airport chaos. All of it settled in at once. But then I realized: I’d made it.

Not gracefully, maybe. Not in the way you’d describe in a travel guide. But I’d made it.

My backpack was wedged under the seat in front of me in a way that would probably make the agent nervous. But I was sitting down. I was on the plane. I was heading to Mexico.

That was a win.

It might not have looked like much, but it absolutely was.

Landing in Mérida: when travel finally feels real

By the time the plane touched down in Mérida, I was ready to be done with airports. There’s a particular feeling when you step off a plane into a warmer place. Your body notices before your brain does. The air changes. The pace changes. The stress of the travel day doesn’t disappear instantly, but it starts to loosen its grip, little by little.

Mérida greeted me with that warm, humid air that makes you immediately aware you are no longer in Montreal.

Then came the airport navigation, which is its own little adventure. More walking. More signs. More “Where exactly am I supposed to go now?” Eventually, I figured it out: you go to a desk, tell them where you’re going, pay them right there, and they give you a receipt. You take that receipt, walk outside, and find the cab that matches your number. Simple once you know. Absolutely mystifying while you’re doing it. Thank you sweet baby Jesus, I speak Spanish.

(I may have spent a few hours at the Airbnb later imagining all the terrible things that could have happened if I’d lost that little receipt.)

But I didn’t lose it. The cab ride from the airport to my Airbnb felt like the final scene of a long first episode. I was tired in that specific travel-day way, where your body is sitting down but your brain is still somewhere over the Atlantic.

Out the cab window, Mérida started to reveal itself. Streets. Lights. Buildings. People. A whole city I didn’t know yet but was about to spend real time in. The reality of what I’d done—closed my apartment for 2 months and go to Mexico—was starting to sink in.

I wish I could tell you I arrived looking refreshed and worldly and completely prepared. I didn’t. I arrived with missing expensive sunglasses, a shiny new $60 charger, a brand new $40 mouse, and a deep, hard-won respect for anyone whose travel day actually goes according to plan.

But I arrived.

And that’s what mattered most.

How a chaotic first day set the perfect tone for what came next

Looking back now, that first travel day was messy, funny, expensive, and just chaotic enough to be memorable. It was also the perfect reminder that travel rarely—almost never—begins the way you imagine it will.

The plan was September 22nd. Then it was September 23rd. The airport transportation went from a sensible ferry-metro-bus combination to a jaw-dropping $120 taxi. The sunglasses vanished into thin air. The charger and mouse stayed behind in Montreal. Boarding times became a mystery. And I discovered that Mexican time apparently starts at the Montreal airport.

And yet, somehow, I still made it to Mérida.

That’s the thing about travel days with their bumps and wrong turns: they can feel frustrating in the moment, but they turn into stories almost instantly. The little disasters become the parts you actually remember. The delay becomes part of the opening scene. The expensive taxi becomes a funny story you tell later. The forgotten charger becomes a lesson you swear you’ll never have to learn again (but probably will).

Will I forget something important on my next trip? Probably. I’m me, after all.

Will I build in more time, double-check my bag obsessively, and keep a closer eye on my sunglasses? I would like to say yes. I really would.

But the real lesson is simpler than all that: pack your patience along with your passport. Everything else—the delays, the forgotten items, the surprises—will eventually become part of the adventure.

I’m here. I’m safe. I’m already falling in love with this place. And yes, I’m still shaking my head a little about that taxi fare.