Leaving… on a jet plane (in that case, please pass the gin)

Flying Lesson 101 - rather walk.

aaaaaaah, nothing quite sabotages a wonderful holiday like the air-trip home.

I mean, honestly what could beat 600 people crammed into a travelling tincan with little air circulation, no access to food until the mean air-stewards decide to give it you and the possibility of oh, i dunno, dying in a fiery death or even worse – surviving the fiery death and

a) having to eat your fat friend until rescue comes

b) you are the fat friend and you get eaten

c)  washing up onto a island where strange things “happen” but nothing really actually happens & then your experiences get made into a 5 series TV show that no one longer watches because they actually don’t care whether or not you and Jack make it off the island with the “Others”.  [sorry, used to be a avid Lost fan and then got really bored with the lame story plot]

But I digress……..

Today I made the return route from Joburg to Cape Town. Let me acknowledge that the trip there was FABULOUS! There was no queue at the BA terminal, while some SAA passengers actually missed their flight because they were still standing in the queue! I had the whole row of the plane to myself, with the emergency exit in front of me (read: extra leg room! YAY!) and they served a vegetarian wrap worthy of Kauai status.  I was happy. I was singing BA’s praises to everyone the whole week. Until today.

It first started off with us boarding at gate C9. Gate C9 turned out to be the farthest gate in the entire f*ing airport. Think Nelson’s long walk to freedom and you ain’t even half hiked that far. We board and I find myself sitting behind a baby who screams like he’s at his own Bris, while still being able to multi-task and kick the back of my seat to Barney’s theme tune. To my left is a woman who just WON’T blow her nose *sniff sniff sniff sniff SNIFF!!!* I fought the violent urge reach between the seats and crush the child’s foot between my fists and (politely) passed the woman a tissue.

So we settle in… the plane starts moving towards to the runaway.. and we chill out on the runway for about an hour – OH NO, sorry ladies and gents, we have a engine failure.. we need you all to get off the plane. Fun times. The air steward even laughed and said to me “at least they figured it out before we were in the air.” F*ing hilarious, wow. I told her she should go into comedy. So we all have to disembark and return to C9. Turns out C9 has no benches for the 600 of us to sit on while we wait. And we were warned not to wander off in case the plane left without us. Fantastic.

I had to pee  and asked the helpful & friendly looking assistant where the ladies were.

HELPFUL LOOKING ASSISTANT: “next to the Wimpy.“

ME: “I am sorry, I don’t know where the Wimpy is” (it is at this point I realise that the helpful looking assistant is neither helpful nor friendly).

NOW PISSY LOOKING MEAN ASSISTANT [in pissy unhelpful voice]: “Carry on walking; it’s there“.

Right……………………… turns out the loos were:

a) no where NEAR a Wimpy but rather a Exclusive Books (easy to confuse between the two I guess) and

b) yes, they were about 2KM away – that is NOT a exaggeration. I was so worried that by the time I took the long walk back to C9 I would have been declared missing (possibly dead)  and the plane would have left without me.

I won’t bore you with the rest, but the rest of the trip included me buying an alleged vegetarian sand which from Vida E that had ham on it (bang goes my no-meat-eating NY resolution already) ; there was no alcohol served on the flight and the woman that I had kindly given a tissue had lost it and sniffed the whole way home. Good times.

The cherry on the top of this delightful trip (that BA will most certainly will be hearing about) was that, after delaying our flight for 2hours, they proceeded to LOSE, yes LOSE all our luggage at Cape Town.  I remained strong (although I broke my other NY’s resolution and was swearing like Kelly Osborne at church) – but British Airways succeeded in breaking the girl next to me, who broke down and wept on the baggage carousel (true story).  This whole process took over an hour to rectify.

BA had to call in the troops to contain the irate passengers of flight BA 6409

Never been so glad to have my feet on the ground! Although after that experience, I need another holiday to recover. Think this time I’ll go by boat …….

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