Hail to the Hive!

Ok so our chilled, relaxed warm and lovely three months in Jamaica came to an end last week and we had to make the long trip home which ended up being…..even longer.

I did notice on the return leg that there wasn’t much wiggle room making the connection in Montreal for our flight to London and was slightly concerned about it and justifiably so as it turned out.

Source: image courtesy of flightaware.com

As feared we were delayed by over 30 minutes taking off and I kind of reset my expectations and said to @millycf1976 that we should just relax as we definitely won’t make the connection now unless they make up the time in the air. As we reached Montreal and came down to land the planes engines suddenly increased in power and we climbed very quickly again. I looked at Milly and said’ well that’s not normal’ and moments later the pilot came on the radio and announced we had to abort the landing as there was a plane on the runway. Brilliant!

So after another loop round and runway approach we finally landed 43 minutes late. No chance of making the connecting flight now.

Source: image courtesy of flightaware.com

As we deplaned there was an Air Canada representative waiting to inform us that those of us heading to London had now been rerouted to Geneva. Geneva! Say whaaaa?

After being assured it was the best option, as it was scheduled to depart in 3 hours, and that our luggage would also be rerouted to accompany us ( hmmmmm really) we set off to get ourselves checked into the Air Canada flight bound for Geneva, Switzerland. Everything seemed to be going smoothly and I was even a little optimistic at this point that all would be well. I was getting hungry though and probably would have preferred a longer delay and a chance to get a belly full of food.

This leg went smoothly with no issues and we landed in Geneva with plenty of time to make our connection with Swiss Air to Heathrow. However nobody seemed to know that we would all be arriving and all the Montreal rerouted passengers all found ourselves gathered at a transit point with no transit bus arriving to take us to our departure gate which was located at another part of the airport. One of the passengers decided to take matters into his own hands and used an intercom phone labelled staff only to inform someone there was a large gathering of passengers with no transit vehicle for them. This turned out to be a stroke of genius on his lart as they weren’t aware we were there and quickly organised our bus to whisk us across the flightline to our departure gate.

Just in time as it happens and luckily , off we went on the last leg.

I hadn’t expected to see lake Geneva on this trip that’s for sure.

Or the Alps for that matter.

Was the highlight of the trip so far.

After consuming some rather delicious swiss chocolate we were soon over the English Channel, which looks very narrow indeed from this vantage point, and very nearly home.

Spotted some folks headed the other way also. I wondered if they were on time

And not too long later we finally landed,mhad the easiest customs and immigration we had ever had to then find that……..

They lost ALL of our luggage. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh

After about 45 minutes with an extremely patient and calm member of staff working in the Customer Service / lost luggage or whatever department they finally located all our bags. They were all still in Canada. We were reassured they would be sent to us the following day. What a fu£&#ng day.

The next afternoon though they did arrive at my sisters address which was a relief although sadly @millycf1976’s JCB hard case was completely smashed to bits. How on earth ( or sky) they managed to do that I’ll never know.

But we at least had all our belongings

Ughhhhhhhh