It pays not to count chickens ...
- vxinternationalpmh
- Jul 24, 2015
- 3 min read
Thursday July 23: Early start this morning. We were due to leave at 0600. Suman had booked a taxi for us. We were in the lobby at 05.45 and a couple of other people were checking out, too and their taxi arrived and took them off. At 6.00 we asked the receptionist if he knew anything about it and he pointed to a guy sitting in the corner. That was our driver and he had been there waiting for us as we were waiting for him. Roads were fairly clear so we got to the airport - and the flight was due to go as scheduled. Result. And it did go as scheduled. Even bigger result. Also good - our bags were checked all the way to Manchester so we wouldn't need to retrieve them anywhere, but why did I have this nagging feeling that it wouldn’t work? In Delhi the queues were nowhere near as bad as last time so it was fairly painless - and our flight got away on time. Very good flight back to Heathrow, quick and easy transfers in Heathrow - I have to say I am very impressed with Heathrow as an airport. Got through queues quickly with only one minor problem. The first time I was in Uganda I bought a good bottle of whisky at duty free in Kigali. Although it was duty free and in a sealed bag it was confiscated by security in Amsterdam. When I looked online afterwards I found a clause in the (very) small print saying that if the EU did not have a specific agreement with an airport and there was a transfer in another EU country, then it wouldn't be allowed through. How many people are caught out by that, eh? It would have been OK if the flight had been into the UK. On this occasion we bought a couple of whiskies and I started to get a bit twitchy, hoping this wouldn't be confiscated as it was a transfer. Even worse, I had noticed that the plastic bag had got a small tear in it in the aircraft locker so I mentioned it to the girl at the check-in desk as we got our boarding card and she said it would be confiscated as it wasn't sealed any more. But she had a solution - we unloaded a whole load of stuff from my hand baggage into pockets and Tom's hand baggage, put the bottle in there and she checked it in. Result! Then, when we had got through all queues we settled down to wait for the flight to Manchester. It had been a very smooth and pleasant journey, and I posted the fact on FaceBook. BIG MISTAKE. The time for the gate to be announced came and went. The time for the gate to close came and went. Then came the announcement the flight was delayed 45 minutes. Not a big problem, though. We caught the flight OK and got to Manchester and waited for the bags. The hand baggage with the duty free came through, and we waited for the others. By the end there were just three bags going forlornly round the carousel with no owners and five owners waiting for bags that weren't appearing. So we went to the BA helpdesk where the staff really were very helpful. Hopefully we should have them delivered the following day - it appears the baggage is still in London! And it looks like we have a nice courier service to deliver our bags to the door ...
I had booked the car-parking until 23.00 to cater for delays. We got out of the car park at 22.56! Then it was head for home - only to find out that the M1 was shut amd we had to do a detour. We finally got home at 00.45 (about 24.5 hours after getting up). But what a wonderful week, with some truly wonderful people who are doing wonderful things for VX.
Comments