After more hellish travel, Luxembourg at last

My run of horrific luck when it comes to travel continued on Friday. Getting to Luxembourg should have been easy. It's a one hour flight, and I'd booked out of City Airport. Which, everyone told me, was an absolute joy because it's so small everything always goes on time. Ha!

First came the emotional trauma of barely getting to the airport. The London transport site says to allow half an hour between Waterloo and City Airport. No. Try close to an hour. Over an hour if you're a clueless newcomer to the line and accidentally get on the wrong DLR train. I arrived just 40 minutes before my scheduled flight, in a serious panic that I wasn't going to make it. I shouldn't have worried. Not only was the flight delayed (supposedly by 30 minutes, ultimately by two hours) but the belt system for moving luggage around had broken. So everyone in the airport had to check in with their airlines, then stand in a single queue to hand in their luggage at one window at the far side of the terminal, by the runways. There were at least 200 people in that line.

With just one trip left in the calendar year after this one, I wonder: Will I take a single flying journey this year that leaves and returns on time, without complications?

We boarded the plane about an hour after it had been scheduled to take off. Fifteen minutes later the captain announced that because of the heavy rain and the low pressure system, the prop plane on which we were sitting was too heavy to fly. Cue further delay as they opened the hold to unload enough luggage to get us off the ground. Meaning that for the whole flight to Luxembourg, everyone on the plane new it was a crap shoot whether or not they'd have luggage on the other side. For me, with a bag filled with Christmas presents and a trip only scheduled to last two days, this caused serious heartburn. (Which, at least, displaced the angst of taking off in a prop plane in heavy wind and rain. I'm sure we were safe, but it sure felt scary.)

At last on the ground in Luxembourg at 11:30, I jumped for joy when my bag emerged. It was a quick ride to the home of the friends I'm visiting. Then, despite the hour, we stayed up a further two hours for our initial catch up and gossip session. Which seemed like a mistake when an excited five-year-old leaned onto my bed at 8am to drag her Auntie Bear into the new day.

But that's another post...