We are off to the Bahamas. We booked a night at the Travel Inn at Gatwick so we could have a good nights sleep before getting up at 6.00am for our flight. So off to bed at 10pm, set the alarms and settle down. After seven hours of lying awake in bed tossing and turning we decide we may as well get up and get to the airport early. We are excited you see, off to see the family again so at 5.30am we arrive at the airport looking for the check–in desks.
We realise straight away that all the hassle yesterday getting the weights correct was worth while. There must be a lot of people confused about the weight limits they can carry in a case, people are sitting all over the airport terminal with cases spread out trying to re-arrange their cases to hold 23kgs in each case. Health and Safety you see, or so they say, a baggage handler should only be expected to handle 23kgs and any case over this weight will carry a £20 penalty. So it seems that it’s OK for the baggage man to handle more than the agreed weight as long as the company receive more dosh.
Me being my normal cynical self I wonder if it is Airline policy to keep people confused about the limits as this seems an excellent way of improving profits without having to declare fare increases. But Virgin wouldn’t do that, would they?
But we have our weights correct and have done the on-line check in so we go to the front of the queue hand over our cases and collect our boarding cards, it’s too easy. We are on our way the cases have gone and we go through the security checks which take a little longer than usual but no problem as I said before it’s better to be safe than sorry.
It’s now half past six it is time for breakfast and I’m on holiday so it’s the works bacon, fried eggs, sausage, tomato, beans and fried potato plus toast and jam and a pot of Earl Grey, a bit disappointed that there is no black pudding but you can’t have everything. Christine has gone shopping because it’s ‘duty free you know, be a shame to miss a bargain’. This time it’s the Estee Lauder and Clinique counters that are hit. “Can’t not buy them at this price” says Christine, I suggest that makes as much sense as Graham Taylor saying “do I not like that” but any attempt at humour is wasted as she needs to be at WH Smiths for another book, some house beautiful or something like that magazines, the morning paper and a couple of bottles of water for the flight. All this of course now has to fit in the bag we are taking in the cabin with us. The bag that had to weigh less than 6kgs when we checked in now needs a fork lift truck to move it about.
Maybe I have lost the plot but I don’t understand why this bag must weigh 6kgs at check in but can weigh anything when me and the fork lift truck manage to get in onto the plane! Another thing is breakfast in the airport has to be eaten with a plastic knife and fork. I assume for security reasons so that I can’t smuggle a metal knife and fork onto the plane to attack people with but I can buy as much booze in glass bottles as I want and carry that onto the plane. Now I have never been in a fight in my life but down our local pub when we were teenagers I never saw anyone attack some-one-else with a knife and fork when a broken bottle was available. It couldn’t be anything to do with airport profits surely, could it?
We are on the plane and there are plenty of spare seats so we finish up with four seats across the middle for Christina and myself giving us plenty of room to spread out. This develops into a good flight, plenty of room and the drinks are free and it soon becomes clear that the principle is that you wonder down to the galley and help yourself. We finish up with a galley that looks like the bar down the local, full of blokes drinking and talking nonsense. I can do both these things so it suits me down to the ground.
But it gets even better, it’s just like being at home, you go down the pub have a few beers perhaps a little wine then come home sit in the chair turn the TV on and fall asleep and before you know it we have arrived. It’s 33%, it’s very warm and quickly you remember what the Bahamas is all about. No one rushes here.
You finally get through passport control, it may take longer than you expect but does it matter? Your cases eventually arrive, not necessarily on the conveyor you expect but does it matter? The air conditioning has broken down, it’s quite warm but that’s why you come here so does it matter? The main thing to remember is to complete your entry form correctly or it’s back to the end of the queue and it all starts over again. And that does matter because eventually you lose patience.
We have arrived, our long day is ended, we are settled in with Alex, Dave and the grandkids Joe and Amber in their new house. I am sitting on the terrace looking over the ocean with a bottle of Kalik in my hand dangling my feet in the pool. I must unpack the Black Book and start making plans for the next few weeks.
