Saturday, December 4, 2010

travel nightmares

I've had quite an interesting week regarding travel plans. We had plans to go to Marrakech, Morocco for a lovely 4 night break in the sunshine with our family before they go home to South Africa and things JUST didn't work out! Our flight from London was for Thursday morning 2 Dec, but Gatwick airport was completely shut down because of the extreme snow conditions and all flights were cancelled. We changed our flight to the next day in the afternoon and hoped for the best. We were very excited the next morning to find out that Gatwick has re-opened and that our flight was on schedule for the afternoon. We could still go for 3 nights out of the planned 4. Got to the airport, checked in, no problem. Yay! We were off to Morocco! HALF WAY throught the flight the pilot had an anouncement: "We have just found out some rather extraordinary news! Spanish air controllers have gone on a surprise strike and we will have more news later on." Turns out that the announcement for the strike was made at 5pm, an hour after our take off and we were now in Spanish airspace. There is no way to get to Morocco without crossing Spain. We had to turn around for an emergency landing in Bordeaux, France and waited inside the plane to refuel. So it was all the way back to London Gatwick then. We got home at about 1am, back in the freezing snow. No point in trying to get another flight as we've missed half our holiday now. Oh well, hopefully we'll have better luck next time...

Passport cover destination world by Sugarcanetrain808 at Etsy

1 comment:

  1. ohmygoodness! you seem remarkably calm! hope you're planning your next trip by now ;-)

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