Birmingham; Friday, 17 December, 2010

The weather forecast had been pretty OK, with snow not forecast until late afternoon, so I was a little perturbed to look out of the window at work a bit before midday to witness a blizzard whipping across Croydon, and more importantly, it clearly starting to settle.

With some trepidation I headed out to City Airport wondering if I would get away or not.

I dropped my bag off at checkin and was told that the runway was currently closed and there was a chance that the flight might be delayed or cancelled. At the time there were a large number of delayed flights, but only one which had been cancelled, and they had started to make boarding announcements so I didn’t think it was going to be too bad.

Unfortunately, I had reasoned without BA’s inability to think about its passengers. They had already cancelled the flight from Frankfurt that made my flight, so that the plane didn’t get stuck in London. Of course, I only found this out from looking at the web once I was in the departures lounge.

So it was little surprise when the flight (due out at 14:45) first went to “Next Info 15:00” and then to “Consult Ticket Desk”. I wandered down to the BA ticket desk to see if there was any chance of getting a transfer onto the 7pm flight which was still running, but was told it was full, as was every other flight to Frankfurt from every other airport in London until Monday. Given that I was flying back on Monday it seemed pretty pointless to go to Frankfurt just to fly back so I had to abandon my plans.

Thankfully (and using that word entirely inappropriately) BA were equally as pathetic with getting the bags back, so I had a good 20 minutes to re-plan.

I was originally flying back from Frankfurt to Birmingham to take in the Christmas markets there as well. So rather than cancelling the whole holiday, why not just head for Birmingham straight away, or on Saturday, as the transport infrastructure was slowly disintegrating for the evening. In the 20 minutes I had to wait for my bag I was able to book not only a stunning deal on a hotel for Saturday and Sunday night in the centre of Birmingham, but also find a really cheap train ticket for travel up.

So that was it. My trip to Frankfurt got as far as departures, but my trip to Birmingham was going to be a little longer.