I’m in Ottawa now, after having survived the escape from Whistler. The summit was great fun. It was awesome to see such an amazing group all together in one place. The best part was having a chance to chat with several people I’d only ever interacted with on IRC or in Bugzilla (Neil, Matthew, Simon, Kai, all of the frenchmozilla guys, _FrnchFrgg_, Shimono-san, and others that I know I’m forgetting now).

I’ve posted some pictures of the trip on flickr, but Deb has a great set of pictures of our journey home specifically. The trip back started on Friday morning, when a bunch of us headed out to the floatplane dock at Green Lake around 10am. After about an hour or so spent waiting at the dock, we were notified that our floatplane couldn’t land because of heavy fog, so we had to make alternate arrangements to fly out of Squamish, which is about a 50 minute drive south of Whistler. These delays meant that we’d all be missing our flights out of Vancouver, so we spent nearly an hour on the phone with Jane at Air Canada, who was really quite excellent, patiently managing to rebook us all on different flights at no cost to us.

We eventually made it to Squamish by bus, where we boarded a floatplane for a 10 minute ride to Vancouver. I was surprised at how pleasant the floatplane experience was. I was expecting the ride to be bumpy and the cabin to be cramped, but it was quite comfortable, and was a great experience overall (it might have helped that I was sitting in the front row). We landed at Vancouver Harbour Water Airport in downtown Vancouver, and had to hurry to catch a cab to the airport. We just barely made it – thankfully our plane was delayed getting in so boarding was pushed back a little bit.

I was glad to be able to land in Toronto in time to head back home and get a little bit of rest before my flight to Ottawa this morning. I’m in Ottawa visiting friends and family this weekend, before heading back to Toronto on Monday night to prepare for a Tuesday morning flight to Las Vegas for Blackhat 2008. After Blackhat, I’m going to be in Calgary for a week, visiting with family and attending my cousin’s wedding, and I’m considering taking a weekend trip to London near the end of August, so I think it’s going to be a busy travel month for me… but I couldn’t think of a better way to start it out than with an exciting adventure leaving Whistler! 🙂