Journey From East To West…

So glad that I finally reached home!!!

Flew from Singa at 10:45pm… Comfortably sitting on my 11C seat (one of the three seaters, towards the aisle, with no seat in front of me)! Nice! All of a sudden this huge whopper guy from Holland asks me to excuse him, as he tried to squeeze into his 11A seat! There was absolutely NO WAY possible that he could squeeze in there.. and rightly so, he didn’t! I felt really silly – such a petite person in comparison, sitting in the outside – so offered to swap seats! My good deed of the day! I did remind him, that I hope he didn’t mind that I get up often – due to my bad back – He was more than welcome… So all was well!

Slept pretty well… then before I knew it, just over 12 hours later we had arrived at Amsterdam… About 5 hours to go until my connecting flight – so just shopped and chilled….

On my flight to C’diff, all seemed well… It takes about 1hr and I should arrive at 10:05am…. Whilst approaching C’diff – the captain informs us of bad weather conditions – so the plane will circulate in the sky until a good opportunity. My first impressions was major thunderstorms or rain (cos Mum had said it was raining heavily the past few days…. The sky above the clouds was beautiful and bright, so it was weird that there should be horrible weather underneath!

45 mins later, all of a sudden the captain states that there is an opportunity and he will take it! Umm…. as we descended… I noticed that it wasn’t raining, it was EXTREMELY foggy… all of a sudden, the descent was aborted and the nose of the plane raised up sharply and then we were back up in the sky -above the clouds!! Scary stuff!

Next anouncement was that we needed to be diverted to another airport…. B’ham! That’s about 2.5 hours away! Great!!! Well, all for our safety, nothing could be done…. Got to B’ham and things were a bit messy.. no real organised form of transport back to C’diff…. Eventually, our airline managed to get a coach for us and we all hopped on!

30 mins into our journey, one of the passengers shouted to the driver… “Wake up”!!! Oh no, the driver had done an all-nighter and was faling asleep at the wheel!! Thank goodness I had my seatbelt on… I think the rest of the passengers quickly put theirs on too! From that point on, everyone was on guard!!!

1.5 hours later, we stopped at the hard shoulder of the motorway and the hazard lights come on… I thought, emergency cigarette break? Emergency toilet break? Guess what? The radiator of the coach had over heated and we needed to stop to cool it down! About 30 mins later – we were off again, driving slower than ever!!!

We finally reached C’diff where Mum picked me up… Got in the car and noticed that the windscreen had a crack from where a stone on the road had chipped it! Surely not, I thought to myself!!! Went to a windscreen repair centre to see if it could be fixed – but no spaces until tomorrow. So off home we went. I finally arrived home, 8 hours later from the actual time I was meant to touch down at C’diff airport…. Oh boy was I glad to get home… Quick time unpacked, showered, ate and slept…. Long long journey home….