Original plans were for me to fly to Montréal for meetings with the Finnish Association of the Deaf and then the congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, and then go on to the United States to visit my family and to speak in a church in Texas.Unexpectedly, a serious situation arose in which a sign language interpreter was needed for a deaf person in Phnom Penh on 25 July, and because both of our Cambodian Sign Language interpreters were in Montréal, it was decided that I would return to interpret. I still needed to speak in the Texas church, however, and it was cheaper to buy a roundtrip ticket back to Phnom Penh than to change my original ticket so I ended up flying to Cambodia for a 3½-day stay.
On short notice, it was almost impossible to get a ticket back to Phnom Penh from Montréal. The travel agent tried the usual trans-Pacific routes and there was nothing and then through Europe and there was nothing. Finally, he was able to cobble together a ticket that took me from Montréal to Winnipeg to Edmonton to Vancouver to Tokyo to Bangkok to Phnom Penh. Normally flying between Phnom Penh and the US East Coast takes 24-30 hours. This ticket took three days because I had to spend a night in Vancouver and another in Tokyo.
Another quirk was that I couldn't return to Montréal as quickly as I wished. If I was gone less than seven days, the price of the ticket tripled, from US$1500 to $4500!