A stressful morning!

When we travel, we pride ourselves on always being early. This morning, however, it all went a bit pear-shaped!

We were up at 5 and out of the hotel by half past for the short walk over to North Terminal. As we walked, the strap on my rucksack broke, so the first thing we had to do when we got into the airport, was to find me another bag! £145 and 30 frantic minutes later, we were finally ready to go to bag drop.

The queue there was huge!!! It's all self-service so it's a matter of chance whether you join a queue with people who know what they're doing or not! In the event, we were the only ones who held anyone up! My new bag got wedged on the conveyor so we had to wait for a member of ground crew to release it 😂

The queues at security were also extremely long! When we finally got to the front, Mark sailed through, but my heart sank as I saw my carry-on bag being diverted to the 'suspicious item' lane!! A thorough search by a very nice customs man revealed nothing more dangerous than my Kindle, so I was allowed through!

Once air-side, we judged that we had enough time for our usual Spoons breakfast. Probably not true! No sooner had we ordered, having had to update the app (we tend to only go to Spoons in airports!), than I got a text message telling us to go to the gate!! It was a full flight ✈ and they wanted to board us early! So, we had to wolf down our breakfast and I missed taking a photo of Mark with his obligatory 7am pint of cider!

Then, it was a mad dash to the gate with no time to buy anything for the flight. The gate queue was crazy with several people objecting to being charged for extra cabin bags.

As I write this, we are on the plane sitting on another queue! This time, it's a queue of planes waiting to take off. I somehow don't feel as relaxed as I normally do at the start of a trip! 😂🤣Read more