SoCal woman recounts nightmare return trip from Canada amid winter storm: ’13 hours on a plane that didn’t move’

Kelly Itaya and a group of longtime college friends took a dreamy winter trip to Whistler, Canada earlier this month.

The two planned to head back to Southern California well before Christmas to beat the holiday season travel rush. But when I boarded the plane from Vancouver and it started snowing, I didn’t know how long the nightmare of returning home would last.

The plane left the gate but then stopped.

“It went on for hours,” Itaya said. “Then a few hours turned into night and night turned into morning. We were still on the plane and I couldn’t believe it. We spent 13 hours in a non-moving plane.”

“I just sat there because the captain told me there was no gate and no staff to help me get off the plane,” Itaya said in a social media post.

When they were finally cleared to disembark, they were still in Vancouver and were told the next available flight would be in 48 hours. The members decided to go freestyle and go home on their own.

“I used Uber from the airport to the border, but Uber could not cross the border,” Itaya said. The driver didn’t have a passport. “As we asked, believe me, he dropped us off at the border a mile away. We checked all his bags and backpacks.” I was walking with it.

“We were dressed for a flight to Los Angeles, so we weren’t quite ready for the snow,” she said. .”

The group explained their plight to border agents and “they laughed at us,” Itaya said.The group called a taxi to the nearest town. A border patrol officer said, “The town you called is one and a half miles down the road.”

Itaya said, “I asked, ‘Do people walk across borders like this?'” And he said, ‘He is not in the winter.'”

So the group continued on through the snow for another mile or so until they finally met a taxi and dropped off at the rental car lot.

“From a taxi, I found a one-way rental car left in the area,” Itaya said. “He drove 5 hours from Bellingham, WA to Portland. Just wanted to get out of the snow. I heard there were a lot of cancellations in Seattle, but I couldn’t be stuck again.”

“From Portland we stayed overnight and left on the first flight,” she said.

Finally, the party flew from Portland to San Jose to Santa Ana’s John Wayne Airport.

“It was a nightmare,” Itaya said of the ordeal from Vancouver to Portland.