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.