So... it just seems like we're just not going to be going on holiday today...
What's happened to stall us in our trip...
Well... we set off from Nottingham slightly later than we had planned - only about 10 minutes mind, not exactly that bad... this is at about 5.15am by the way...
Heading off down the M1 was pretty fine until we hit some roadworks - I forget where exactly... luckily we joined at junction 24, which was 2 junctions down from where the man shot himself and caused the motorway to be closed all night...
Then we hit slow moving traffic somewhere close to Luton... arse. Then we hit the M25 and everything went all kinds of slow again. We decided that this point that we were never going to make our 8.30am taxi appointment at the place where we were leaving the car... so we called up and pushed the time forward to 9am (a time which ideally we would have liked to have been at the airport at!)
No worries. After a phone call or two, we found that the checkin desk was due to be closing at 10.30am. We'd easily make it in time.
Make it in time we did... we arrived at the airport at 9.45am and checked in. We were at this point told the lovely news that the plane was delayed and was in Luxembourg being serviced. (Plane was due to leave at noon - we were told we'd get the first update on the whereabouts of our plane and what was happening at 2pm... great.
Two o'clock came... and went. We managed to find out that the plane was in Luxembourg being serviced and an update on it's whereabouts would be given to us at 5.30pm... we were all given a nice letter letting us know this fact... after much whining and stuff they gave us each a 7 pound meal voucher... which doesn't really go that far in an airport - but at least it helped pay for a meal.
Erm... yeah... so 5.30pm came, pretty much soon after I wrote the post sat in the check-in area...
"No plane today, you'll be on a flight at 8.05am tomorrow morning, we'll sort out the hotels for you all and organise reuniting you with your luggage". This took a good hour, if not more to organise. I can see how it would take quite a while to organise rooms for a jumbo jet full of people at short notice - most people around thought this'd be a pretty instant thing to do.
Getting our baggage back was fun... (I'm sort of using the word fun in jest here... it was more interesting than fun...)
Clearly when we checked in our luggage it dissappeared off to the secure part of the airport... you know... the bit past the point of no return... now we had to get this back... now they could have loaded a million trucks with it and dumped it in a pile near the check-in desks for us to find... or they could have it all loaded onto a carosel and let us collect it like we would have been doing at Sanford about 1 hour later (if things had gone to plan)... but how do you get to the carosels from Departures... simple... they open a staff door and let us all go though...
What complicates this, is that everyone has to go through the security checks on the staff door to get into the secure side - x-ray machine, metal detector, passport... job lot.
So, now we're in Arrivals collecting our bags just like the people who'd flown in from some country or other... so how do you get out? Through customs of course... but which one? Are we Blue, travelling from the EU... Green... nothing to declare.... or Red... something to declare...
Well some silly spanish worker person told us to go... Red... now I'd have opted for Blue... but Red fair enough... ah well... when we started going through Red we were told to go to Green. Oh well.
Eventually we found where to get the bus to the hotel from... without any help from the tour operators... and when we finially arrived (along with 50 rooms worth of other people) the hotel wasn't quite sure we were all booked in...
I'm in a lovely business class double room all to myself. It's all really rather nice - much nicer than where we're going to be staying in Florida! Not suprised, the rooms are like 125 quid a night or something... (mine coule be more, being all business like and all... with 2 phones, Internet access [that I've got to pay for it seems] and that sort of jazz.
Time for bed to catch up on the snoozes... we've got to be up at about 3.40am to get the bus back to the airport for check-in part deux...