I promised you a story of my near miss flights....
I should start my story a couple days earlier as my journey actually began when I moved upstairs....but only from the apartment I was in, where I had slept and belonged and gotten awfully comfortable for 109 days.
So I packed my bags and moved up a flight of stairs for three nights. I don't know if I mentioned my new life skills of teacher, cook and painter (not the arty kind) but I had painted (over the above lines I'd marked on the wall....joking) in the apartment downstairs and it was too smelly to sleep there!
My new penthouse view.
Three days later, on the 5th of July, I hopped in a car, was smuggled across the border and found myself standing in a nearly empty parking lot at the Birmingham Airport.
Only one entrance (the furthest away of course) and mask on, hands sanitized and I look up to a disconcertingly deserted airport.
I checked in with a very nice half Canadian and half British guy, we had a nice chat and he kindly pretended my bag wasn't 4 kilos overweight, how the #@£& did that happen! I left half my stuff in Wales!
Through security with the people from the one other scheduled flight happening around the same time to a dark, empty concourse with only a WH Smith open.
As I sat in dark deserted no man's land eating my sandwich and watching the empty departures board for my gate. There were only two flights, how hard can this be? It says gate announcement in 5 min.....for much longer than that.....actually long enough for me to hear the dreaded 'last call for Eurowings flight to Düsseldorf'
I had to run for it, along with about 20 other people. I guess its been so long since they've had to work they have forgotten how that departures board thing is supposed to work.
Onboard services are very limited for those of you who are wondering. Masks mandatory onboard unless eating or drinking and then masks back on.
And I'm off.....weeeeeeeeee......so excited, huge grin hidden under my mask until we hit a huge pocket of turbulence and then the mask conveniently hides my swearing as I'm reminded of why I hate flying.
I arrive in Düsseldorf only to find those handy no contact machines for checking my EU passport closed and everyone funneled through to a live border guard, which I find odd with all the talk about everything going contactless but OK.
With no temperature checks, no Covid questions, she had me stand there forever whilst she inspects my passport.
Then asks me ridiculous questions like, where was I born and when was I born...maybe her handy dandy passport scanning machine was broken or she doesn't actually know how to read.
I'm in! Waiting two hours for my connecting flight, when all of a sudden I hear the familiar cry of 'last call for Eurowings flight to Prague'.....what the everloving....it hasn't been that long! Am I seriously this out of practice?! My phone didn't update the time so I had six minutes to get to my flight, good thing I was just around the corner.
Ooopsy Daisy. Flights are still pretty limited, hence the no direct flight to Prague and then the question of what I would have done stuck in Düsseldorf.
My arrival in Prague is without fan fare, its quiet but normal airport day quiet. I go to hand my passport over, he sees its Czech and waves me thru. No questions, no temperature checks and all of a sudden I find myself masked up in the back of an Uber. Home in my favourite city.
