A nasty night of delays

So, the best laid plan was a night flight from Boston to London, four hours wait at Heathrow, and then a quick flight to Frankfurt; getting us in with time to wander round the the Christmas Market and get some food.

That’s not how it panned out.

Our flight out of Boston was initially delayed by an hour, which was mildly frustrating but not a big issue. The started boarding at 10:30 instead of 9:30. But, when the plane while they tried to fix the problem  was half full, the changed their minds and had everyone get off. There was a technical problem. They then dithered for the next hour  between fixing the problem and moving us to a backup plane.

In the end they decided the problem was fixed enough to proceed, and boarding began again. Now in the context of baking a cake ‘near enough’ is fine when you’re considering how much sugar to add. In the context of flying a place over the Atlantic, ‘near enough’ is not so reassuring. We were perfectly aware that the plane was not entirely fixed because the pilot told us so when explaining that we were not allowed to fly directly over the Atlantic and would be flying North over Canada, Greenland, Iceland and then down to London – A process that would add 2-3 hours to our flying time, and turn a six-hour flight into a nine-hour flight.

That reassuring start meant that every time we hit a bump, and there were many, it was hard not to leap to the conclusion that near enough had not been good enough.

So a long flight, with little sleep, and lots of bumping had poor Callum spending the last part with a sick-bag attached and breaking his much-improved flying record.

We landed in London having totally missed our connecting flight, but British Airways did well – our re-booked boarding passes were waiting for us and our new flight was to leave in two hours. We needed caffeine and found it with the best coffee and tea we’ve had in three weeks.

But then our bad luck re-surfaced.  Our flight to Frankfurt was delayed – by ten and then forty minutes. We got on and then spent another hour delayed on the runway.

So by the time we landed in Frankfurt we were thoroughly exhausted. So much so that we blindly pursued the plan we’d put in place when we assumed all was going to go smoothly and got a train into the centre of Frankfurt. And, you’ve guessed it, our train was delayed.

We stumbled into our hotel at 7pm, now so tired we were both having difficulty focussing on filling in the registration forms. Our plans thoroughly awry – but we are looking forward to a good night’s sleep to get things back on course.

There are no photos from today – the one attached to this post is just a nice one Cal took yesterday