This summer as the weather improves it’s going to be hard for folks to stay apart in parks. I struggled with it recently...

And for months… nothing. I went the next 36 years believing Marvel never read my letter — or at least not printed it— until while bored and blessed with oodles of downtime, I stumbled on the online comic page below... thanks for typing, Grandma…

… and so I wrote a hand-written note. My grandmother Shields was visiting at the time, and would not allow my penmanship to be read by anyone, so she took me to the family typewriter, and together we wrote Marvel Comics. she mailed the letter and I kept picking up PPTSSM…

So… story time… when I was a young lad in 1986… I decided to write a letter to Marvel Comics for an issue of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man that I quite enjoyed at my young age… Spider-Man had defeated Sabretooth, a mighty villain I had not previously known…

At the end of the day, my Montreal-Toronto-London-Barbados journey to arrive in St. Vincent started Saturday around 1am and ended Sunday evening. It took more than 12,000 km in the air, involved crossing an ocean —twice. Here is my expression joining my crew on the dock.

So: I board in London yesterday. After about 12 hours we land in Barbados, and we fly on to St. Vincent. I couldn’t believe it: I had reversed with a commercial flight what Columbus did with a caravel: I made it to the Caribbean by going east first. At the end, only a day late.

The vagaries of Internet coverage means we join your faithful corespondent a day after his journey from Britain in the third instalment of his adventure to St. Vincent… read on true believer, for a tale of transcontinental derring-do…

Obviously this flight it made no sense: flying from Toronto to London to reach St. Vincent on the other side of the ocean. I figured it was a direct flight that had seats. When I checked in, I find out it makes a stop in Barbados first. So… why didn’t I just go through Barbados?

So: your correspondent left home in Montreal around midnight Saturday morning. Local time is 8:34 Sunday. My flight is slated to arrive on St. Vincent 4:30pm Sunday. It will be a string of flights spanning two continents, five cities and crossing an ocean for a connecting flight.

My Toronto-London connection also allowed for some shopping. Duty-free gin and this sterling fellow…

LONDON (BS) — Our story resumes in the British capital, where this intrepid reporter is connecting after an eight hour flight from Toronto. The first leg is London-Barbados, and then Barbados-St.Vincent. Stay tuned true-believer, the journey is but half done!

Just an Airmageddon recap: to get to St. Vincent I was originally Montreal-Toronto-Barbados-St. Vincent. Now I am Montreal-Toronto-LONDON ENGLAND-St. Vincent. Stay tuned, true believers… An Asian destination could be in the future…

She looked up and said: “this is a little crazy but it should work.” So tonight, your scrivener is booked on a flight to London (UK, not Ontario), then a direct flight to St. Vincent in the morning arriving in the afternoon. I took a selfie with the architect of my salvation.

Despair began to creep into the psyche of your wayward correspondent. The quest for the course that could thread between the Scylla of oversold seats and the Charybdis of limited airlift seemed impossible. But that Air Canada employee found a way. And don’t you want to know how?

Port of Spain, Georgetown and St. Lucia are all floated as possible stopovers, but efforts to book onto St. Vincent with any useable timeframe. Perhaps the most intrepid, professional and polite Air Canada employee talked me through the different scenarios for <two hours.

Final destination: St. Vincent. This intrepid reporter already knows there are few flights there, and they’re almost all oversold. Billy reaches the customer service desk. Even if he can get to Barbados tomorrow, there are no seats to St. Vincent till Tuesday or Wednesday.

Our story picks up at Pearson Airport, where a certain vacationing reporter ended up after his connecting flight to Barbados took off without him in it. (My first flight was cancelled, rebooked one was too late, the Barbados flight left on time). Now begins the true challenge…

So I’ve gone from being fourth to like, two-hundred-and-forty-fourth. WILL Billy Shields make the connections necessary to reach his destination? WILL he sleep on an airport floor? Or WILL he become his own travel story? Stay tuned true believers as a fascinating odyssey unfolds.

All of us start lining up around 2 am in front of the Air Canada booths to check in/ask questions/etc. a security agent tells us we can’t line up till 3:30am. So we all disperse. Then, about 30 minutes later, this lineup forms but security doesn’t say anything.

I also find out my first flight is delayed almost three hours. It’s the only one delayed on this board…

Per airport instructions I arrive three hours before my flight. There is no one here. As an aside, I also have to pay the cab who brought me here in cash because Interac is down from cell outages. Meaning I am at the intersection of two stories I’ve covered…