Hope the trip was worth it.

As I boarded the train south to Århus from Aalborg I noticed a number of people getting on who had obviously just come from the airport and were heading deeper into Denmark and it reminded me of the lady I had seen at the baggage reclaim belt at Aalborg on Sunday.

Her bag came off just before mine, and as she was taking it off the belt it was pretty obvious that she had just come off of a mammoth trip.

I think the longest tag I’ve ever had has had two airport names on it (Tallinn via Helsinki, Hammerfest via Tromso) but this lady had two tags on her bag as one was full and they had had to go onto a second tag.

In order the tags were LAX, FRA, CPH, AAL. In short to get to Aalborg airport at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon she had come into Aalborg on the flight from Copenhagen, where she had arrived from Copenhagen, where she had arrived from Frankfurt, where she had arrive from Los Angeles, where she had arrived from who knows where.

Firstly I dread to think how long she had been travelling and I hope that the trip was worth it, and secondly it shows that the system does work. The bag was loaded into the system at an airport somewhere within a single flight of Los Angeles and has transited through three separate airports never once missing the connecting flight.

What’s the betting that if one of those flights had been with British Airways that the bag would currently be going round the baggage carousel in Kuala Lumpur with the confused baggage handlers going, Aalborg, Aalborg, where the hell is Aalborg?

Did it shrink in the wash?

It’s pretty wet in the Faroe Islands. So you would expect that some things might shrink a bit in all that water.

I’m slightly concerned that it appears to also be shrinking the planes.

When I checked in at Stansted I was assigned seat 17F a seat on the back row.

The fact that the plane only went back to row 17 already indicated that this wasn’t the largest of aircraft.

We were called forward to the gate 10 minutes early and I was one of the first people to board, which was lucky as I walked down the plane and got the distinct feeling that there was something missing.

What were missing were rows 16 and 17.

They did sort of exist, in so much as there was a 16 A, B, C and a 17 A and C, but no D’s, E’s or F’s for either row.

I checked with the stewardess who suggested I sit in 15F for the moment as the flight was almost full, but they didn’t normally fill those rows.

Thankfully nobody boarded with a boarding card for 15F, but it’s a bit of a concern that between the details being loaded into the system and the plane arriving it had shrunk by two rows.

Of course, there is always the chance that it was just ServiceAir being incompetent...

It shouldn’t make a difference, but it does

Perhaps it’s an experiment I need to repeat at a busier time, perhaps it was just a statistical anomaly that every so many people they do it, or perhaps it does show an in built prejudice in the system.

As I had been in work in the morning I went to Gatwick in a shirt and tie. Having checked in I made my way over towards the security screening area.

The area wasn’t busy at all; in fact where there would normally be queues of people waiting to have their boarding cards checked there were instead staff sitting around trying to attract people to come over to their desks.

To get to the main entrance to the security area you have to walk past the entrance to “Fast Track” this is the speedy line for those people travelling business or first, which, when the security checks are besieged by thousands of people off on holidays, probably does make sense.

Two large families had already walked past and been pointed in the direction of the main entrance to the security area, which is where I was heading, when I was invited to go through fast track “as it was very quiet”.

Now, was that because I was travelling by myself, or was it because I was smartly dressed?

And if anyone is wandering, there is no difference between the fast track lanes and the normal lanes, other than green coloured flooring!

If it all appears to be going to well

A massive queue at checkin, but through in 10 minutes.
Another big queue for security, but again through quite quickly.
Before you’ve even had time to grab more than the bare essentials your flight is showing a gate number.
You walk to your gate, the closest gate there is to the departures lounge.
The plane is already on stand and has off-loaded all the inbound passengers.
A couple of minutes later you are all boarding, nearly 30 minutes before you are due to leave.

It’s at this point that it all starts to go wrong.

Sadly, four people hadn’t been paying attention to the screens, and as the time ticked down to our scheduled push back moment they were still nowhere to be seen.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a problem if they just had hand luggage, shut the door and send the plane on its way.

It is a problem when they have two bags in the hold that have to be located and off-loaded as well.

It had all been going so smoothly, it’s just a shame we were over 20 minutes late leaving!

The hell that isn’t Gatwick

It’s the first week of the school holidays, the gloomy predictions that not very many people would be travelling this summer have been disproven by a combination of aggressively cheap flights and the promise of a barbecue summer, which instantly condemned it to rain for most of July (which it has proceeded to do!)

Consequently, the thought of going through Gatwick has been filling me with dread, and to begin with today I had every reason to believe my worst fears, of a heaving terminal full of stresses parents and restless children, would be fulfilled. The train was heaving, there was luggage stacked in every corner, and when I saw the queue for the lift off of the platform into the terminal building (at least 10 lift loads deep) I thought it was going to be bad.

It looked even worse when I got to the easyJet checkin area where the queue was massive, but then my preconceptions and fears were proved wrong.

Despite a queue which could have been measured in fractions of a kilometre, it moved at a speed which could have been measured in kilometres. In less than 5 minutes I was through the queue, at a desk and checked in onto my flight.

Even more to my surprise was the virtually non-existent queues for security, which was operating with a level of efficiency I would normally expect from Munich airport, not Gatwick.

So, having left myself nearly three hours to get checked in and through security I find myself in the busy, but by no means packed, departures lounge, with ages to wait for my flight to board.

Lucky I didn’t book that place in the Business lounge that I was thinking about but never got round to. I’d be plastered by the time I boarded if I had!

Money vs Environment

The government wants everyone to be greener. I’m in agreement with this, but sadly, economics does play a part in being green.

I could have caught a train back from Carlisle to London, which would have been environmentally much friendlier than flying back from Glasgow (ignoring the fact that an electric train still creates a pocket of pollution wherever the electricity to power it is being generated, but in any instance this is significantly less than the output of a plane)

However, the economics don’t stack up. It’s the half term holiday, and despite checking every couple of days from thirteen weeks out no cheap tickets were ever released. At eight weeks out I had to give up looking and make a decision. Do I pay £133 for the cheapest ticket I can find for the train, or do I look at alternatives.

So in the words of the MasterCard adverts
Train from Carlisle to Glasgow (First class) - £11
Night in a hotel in Glasgow - £50
Flight Glasgow to London City - £39
Saving £33 on the train fare, do you still wonder why people fly!

And the worst thing is that could have been even cheaper if I had gone standard (though I wouldn’t have got the very pleasant Breakfast from Transpennine Express), booked the hotel earlier and flown back into Gatwick with easyJet rather than city with BA.