thewills'wanderings

I’m sure some of you have watched this reality TV show(Leigh I know you want to apply to enter it). Anyway, after our last 2 days in Europe/London I think we could win the family version!

Let’s start with our last day in Germany. Because we were flying with Ryan-Air and we discovered their Ryan-Air Frankfurt airport was miles away from Frankfurt main airport where our campervan had to be dropped off, we had to do some serious co-ordination to make it as easy and cheap as possible(haha!). The plan was for Tim to drop all of us girlies and all the luggage at the Ryan-Air airport at around midday(our flight wasn’t until 6.10pm) so we had a long day at the airport. I had lots of food and stuff to do so I wasn’t too stressed about that. Tim had to drive about an 1 hour 20minutes to drop off the campervan , then get a taxi to the main airport and a shuttle bus to us. All a bit complicated but he had lots of time and we’d all done it the other way round when we arrived.

So, I spent the day at the airport juggling luggage in our bags to make sure no bags were overweight and waited for Tim to arrive. When the shuttle bus arrived at 4.45pm with no Tim, I knew that something was wrong and Tim might not make it in time. Stress was building. 5.30pm and he still hadn’t arrived and finally I gave up and went and checked when the next flight was. Our flight to LA from London was leaving at midday the next day so we had to get another flight to connect with that. By this time it was 5.45pm and Tim came racing in super-stressed as you can imagine. He had realised he might not make the bus shuttle so decided to get a taxi the whole way. He got in the taxi at 3.15pm and he should have been there easily by 4.30pm, that is if he had a driver that knew how to get there. The driver got lost and they drove around for nearly 3 hours! Unbelievable!We didn’t have such drama in all our Asia travels!

So, we had missed our flights and had to book some more fast. Luckily, we managed to get flights for the next morning at 6.35am so we would be able to connect with our next flight. We got a room at a B&B right across the road from the terminal and had a few laughs about our drama. We’ll definitely be trying to claim this on our travel insurance. All went well the next morning, up at 4am, buffet breakfast and over to road to catch our flight.

We arrived at London Stanstead airport and had our bus booked to Heathrow airport. The bus didn’t leave on time and then proceeded to get held up in roadworks which was all a bit stressful after our previous day, but we didn’t really panic because we thought we still had lots of time up our sleeves. We arrived at Heathrow only to find that the bus stopped at Terminal 1 and we had booked to go to Terminal 5. They are about 10 minutes apart by bus. We were told on arrival that the bus would go to Terminal 5 when another driver arrived but they didn’t know when! I got quite stroppy by this stage and really did have a bit of a tantrum. I don’t very often get seriously angry with people but I was starting to feel very helpless and I did get very angry with the driver and the bus staff. The girls said I was like one of those crazy netball Mums on the sideline. Oh dear!

Well, because of my tantrum we did get advised that a train would be the quickest way to get to Terminal 1(they probably just wanted to get rid of us) so we raced down the ramp and round corners and up a lift. We were quite frantic by this stage, desperately trying to buy tickets for the train only to find that it was free! We finally got down to the platform only to hear an announcement over the speaker that all trains on the Heathrow express will be suspended due to a fatality. By this stage, I thought it was all over and there would be no way of making our flight. To make it worse Anne’s parents were waiting for us with two huge bags that they had kept for us while we were in Europe and I knew they would be stressing. Our next plan was to race and try to find a black cab to take us to Terminal 5. So, off we went, up ramps, along corridors desperately trying to find the exit where we could get a taxi. By this stage my shoelaces were undone and I was having great difficulty controlling the overloaded trolley. The girls seemed to think it was all quite a challenge and were running as fast as they could. Even Charlotte, who usually begs to be carried even the shortest distance, managed to keep up. We found a black cab that agreed to squash us all in and drove us to terminal 5. When we arrived I sprinted in like a crazed woman while Tim got bags and children out of the taxi. Margaret and Colin soon found us, them looking almost as stressed as us and all was well! It was so nice to see them. Margaret had fruit for the girls which so nice. It was like the girls having one of their own Granny’s there. She even took away their munched on apple cores!Don’t you just love grandmothers!

So, we made the flight and after a glass of wine, I soon recovered. The flight went well, thanks to the individual tv screens. We arrived in LA and got a shuttle to our hotel nearby. By the time we got to bed we had been awake 24hours!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 7:34 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.