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AK2007,D-1: My worst trip ever

Jul 2, 2007 | 3 minutes read

Tags: Akademy, KDE

I was still at home, that the trip was looking bad already. Around one hour before leaving I felt sick and had stomach ache… Just perfect, a plane is a so lovely place to feel bad. But well, I wasn’t bad enough to skip this!

As planned, I met up with Anne-Marie, Alexis, Florian and Thibault to take our flight. Check-in went smoothly, we embarked… and waited… and waited… until the pilot told us we had a small problem with one engine. So, we waited even more… until they asked us to disembark. Fine, so we’re back in the airport, it looked like will miss our connection.

After one more hour waiting to know if the flight would be cancelled or not (which would mean we’d still be in Toulouse as I’m writing this), they managed to repair the problem (the right engine was leaking fuel). So we embarked again, and waited for a new window to take off… fine you get used to waiting I guess. And finally we took off, twenty minutes before the time we’re supposed to embark in our connection at Amsterdam. So now, for sure we’re going to miss it.

Eventually we arrive in Amsterdam, which probably prove the leak was really repaired. We rush to the transfer desk… and… wait, of course! When it’s our turn, we get the following deal: three of us (Florian, Thibault and me) are booked on the next flight to Glasgow at 9pm (our was supposed to take off at 3:30pm), two of us (Anne-Marie and Alexis) are booked on the next Edimburg flight at 10pm then the airline will pay for a taxi to Glasgow. Ok, fair enough… at least will be in our beds in Glasgow.

So we waited our new flights… 8:15pm came we’re going to embark for the Glasgow flight at last! We’re even feeling a bit more lucky as we met Thiago, sharing the flight with him looked like good omen. Unfortunately, we still have surprises coming… at the last minute, Florian wasn’t allowed to embark, we got overbooked and he got sacrified on the austel of low prices. He’s told to try his luck with the Edimburg flight.

Thiago, Thibault and me got in the plane. Thibault got executive class, nice. We waited… and waited… until the pilot announced that there’s a problem with the plane. Yes, again! Another plane, another issue. The good thing is that we were able to call Florian to check how it’s going for him. Unfortunately, no Edimburg plane for him, it was full too. So he’s staying in Amsterdam for the night.

And of course he needed his baggage, and I noticed that I lost his baggage number… So we’d no idea if he’d be able to get it back. I was really feeling bad about this… Luckily when we arrived in Glasgow, Thiago had a voicemail on his cellphone from Florian. Apparently they found a solution for his bagage.

So all in all we got to Glasgow, in three separate planes and a taxi, one have travelled for 24h… and the minimum delay was for Thibault and me, we had “only” a 6 hours delay. But, yeah we were all lucky, despite the convoluted trip, no bagage got lost.