A Fresh Start

I overslept! Woke at 2 o’clock, turned off the alarms and clearly went straight back to sleep. Luckily, I woke again at ten to three aware there was something I was meant to be doing …

Half an hour later I was in the car, heading for the airport - conscious that I wasn’t going to make the 03:25 check-in time that the airport had confirmed.

03:25 my arse! I got there at a quarter to four. It was shut. The only sign of life (and then only just) was a security guard dozing in the information booth. Cursing, I headed back to the car, set the alarm for 04:30 and closed my eyes.

All too soon the phone was screaming at me again, so out I got and wheeled the bag back to the terminal. The doors opened this time and I strode in to find that two others had turned up while I’d dozed. No sign of life at the check-in, though.

At five o’clock the check-in opened but everything was being processed in a typically Norfolk (i.e. laid back) fashion. The line was slowed further by a gentleman travelling to Kuala Lumpur (not direct, of course). The baggage allowance on the connection to Amsterdam is 20kg in the hold, 10kg as hand luggage. His hold baggage came to 48kg with another twenty as carry on. This in itself wasn’t the problem - it was the fact that he clearly couldn’t understand what he was being told.

Imagine the fun when it came to the security questions - he just answered “Yes” to everything. This means that although he’d packed the bag himself, he’d left it unattended, had been asked to carry something on the flight for someone else and was carrying sharp items both on his person and in his overweight hand luggage. Oh dear.

By half past I was checked in through to Detroit (Wayne County) and was renegotiating my mortgage to get a coffee and a danish pastry at Café Oasis.

I felt a little sorry for the flight crew - they clearly had to offer everyone orange juice and a gevulde koek (whatever that was - all I know is that it was almondy) but with a flight time of 35 minutes it was all a bit of a rush. Here(left) is my view of Norfolk disappearing beneath me through the grubby window.

Big Fat Bloke had seemed to be worryingly chatty as I’d taken my seat but as soon as we took off he shut his eyes and settled down for a snore. He surface briefly when we touched down to inform me that it was a 20-minute taxi before the plane stopped and he was right. It was then another 10 minutes in the bus to the terminal itself. (See if you can spot the plane which was parallelling our descent into Schiphol in the second photo)

We got into Schiphol on time, unfortunately - this means I’ve got over 4 hours before the flight to Detroit. A trip around the museum sounded like a good way to while away an hour or so, but it’s the smallest museum I’ve ever been to - eight or nine paintings (none of them particularly remarkable in my opinion) and a large model of a windmill (of course). Fifteen minutes later and I was prowling the concourse, seeking prey something to do when I spotted the “WiFi Zone” signs. Wahey!

Let’s see. E6 for 30 minutes or E10 for 24 hours. Not too unreasonable given the alternative (boredom), hence this very prompt first post.