We woke up shortly before landing, around 00:25.  It was snowing outside, and at a pretty good clip.  We had to wait to disembark because they needed to clear snow off the ramp.  We heard other passengers, from the other Churchill Wild group (also on our plane) grumbling about how the “valet” service meant their bags got snowed on whilst we all waited to get off the plane.  We walked from the tarmac into the terminal, then down a hall, to pick up our bags.  Ours happened to be some of the first off, so we grabbed them and walked across the street to the hotel.  We expected to see others at the hotel or in the room to drop our gear (parkas, etc.), but both of those went so extraordinarily fast that we never saw anyone, so we inadvertently did an Irish goodbye.  Sorry, everyone!

We got (back) to sleep for a short bit, then woke up around 04:20 to get ready for our flight to the US.  It was very weird to not be wearing long underwear.  Looking out the window, it had snowed quite a bit.  When we left the hotel and crossed the street to enter the terminal, there was a snowplow on the road.  Inside, the stupid machine to print out our boarding passes (we’d already checked in online and just needed to print out the passes) was infuriating at 5 in the morning, but we managed to get our passes before knocking it over and/oor breaking the screen.

Global Entry sped up the process through passport control, though not as much as in Tijuana two weeks prior (also, it seemed crazy to us that it had been less than two weeks ago).  We got to the gate around 05:20 and waited for boarding.  The flight was evidently quite overbooked, and they were offering substantial amounts of money for people to volunteer for a later flight.  It got as high as $1200 a ticket by the end.  Because of how full the plane clearly was going to be, plus the fact we had zero status on Delta and thus were in the last boarding group, we were quite worried about getting our bags in the overhead storage.  Thankfully everyone followed directions and there was indeed space - props to Canada and Canadians.

The plane was slathered in ice and snow (the view out the window is above on the left).  Moreover, we couldn’t back out because of a lack of traction by the vehicle that pushes the plane out of the gate.  We had to wait for a bigger truck to push “with more oomph.”  It worked, and we got away from the gate, but after that we didn’t really go anywhere.  Apparently we were in line for de-icing, but nobody informed us of what was going on (or not going on) until we were almost there.  Fortunately we had a 2.5 hour layover, so even with the long delay, we were okay, but we’re sure others weren’t so fortunate.  At the de-icing area, first they sprayed some orange stuff, then some green stuff, and finally we could see out the window.  We took off about 1.5 hours late.

Once in the air, there were thankfully no issues, and we both slept.  In Minneapolis we had a short walk to the gate for our San Diego flight.  We just relaxed for a bit.  The boarding announcements were welcome for once.  Collin (with two Ls) and Holly (with two Ls) were our gate agents, and Collin was an amateur comedian.  This flight wasn’t quite 100% full, but almost.  We thankfully got our bags in the overhead bins without issue.  We got a fair amount of sleep again, and landed around 13:00 in sunny San Diego.  We went straight to the taxi line (going to our house costs about the same for a taxi and Uber, and a taxi is always waiting) and took the short ride home.  There was unusually high traffic, but we had to go only 3 kilometers or so.  We dropped our stuff and then got in the car to go pick up Avon.  

We were back home by 14:30.  We then put him in his crate so that we could go get our usual Friday lunch at Puerto La Boca.  We talked with Jordy for a while, then came home around 16:30.  Crystal took a nap while Justin uploaded photos onto the laptop and finally caught up on all the amazing sights from the trip up to Churchill.  For such a (relatively) short trip, we had an incredible assortment of great photos, and we really lucked out not only with what we saw, but who we saw it with.