Missing our flight to Trinidad

 

What makes a difficult day? Hearing bad news?  Struggling with emotions?  Nothing going right?

The first day of our holiday this summer was a difficult day.

The flight to Trinidad was leaving at 10am from Gatwick. We waited at the station at 6.15am for a train that should have got us to Gatwick for 7.35am, but because of a points failure got us there at 9.10am.

BA would not let our luggage on the flight. This has never happened to me before.  I thought in extreme emergencies you could carry your baggage (one suitcase each) through customs, but this was not happening.

I didn’t know what to do. What were our options?  Could our luggage go on a different flight?  No.  it could be sent, but that would take 5 working days.  They would have allowed us to travel on the same flight the next day, but that would mean missing a day of our Trinidadian wedding experience.  I didn’t want to do that.

In the end we got a later flight to Barbados, but had to pay for tickets to Trinidad via St Vincent. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t a big expense and with hassle we can hopefully claim it back, but psychologically it was a blow and a big chunk out of our holiday spends.

In the end this plane went an hour late because they threw 3 people off the flight.

So, we spent 3 hours in Barbados airport, which may be the only time in my life I get to visit there, missed our hosts who came to pick us up from the airport and finally arrived after a journey of some 22 hours.

En route, as well as watching ‘Ladybird’ and ‘Darkest Hour’ I read ‘A Long Way Gone’ by Ishmael Beah about being a child soldier in Sierra Leone

It puts a difficult day in perspective.