The Journey Home
The Journey Home
This was the first time I've flown home from the ship, and so a new experience. My flight from St. Maarten was at 1720, so I was somewhat unimpressed to be told by the crew office that I needed to leave the ship at noon. Apparenbtly the port agent had said that due to the number of ships in he was worried about teh traffic. This seemed rather over-the-top considdering that, by the look of the map, the airport was about 5 miles away. The entire island is only about 15 miles across!
The reason for this soon emerged - the port agent was saving a few pennies, as there was a crew member from another ship sharing our taxi, who had a flight at 1510. The result was that rather than having a relaxing day looking around the island I spent 3.5 hours sitting at a small[1] airport in the middle of nowhere reading a book.
Although I've had my arm out of it's tubigrip for the last week or so I put it back on for arriving at the airport in the hope of getting a free upgrade. The Air France lady looked sympathetically at my arm, announced that the flight was quite full (automatic response, methinks, considering that in the end about 25% of teh seats were occupied), and went off to the back office for fifteen minutes to work out whether I was entitled. God knows what she did for all that time - perhaps phoning Paris?! - but when she came back she said that certainly, she could upgrade me, and that would be US$165 please. It seems that P&O didn't pay enough for the ticket for me to be upgraded for free. So I turned this down.
As it happened there was no great discomfort, as the plane was 3/4 empty and so I could spread out over two seats. Not quite business-class legroom, given the interruptions of armrests, etc., but not too bad as 8-hr flights go. Especially as the seat-back screen in front of me had a game of Solitare built into it :-).
We arrived in Paris on time, and I'm now sitting in Charles De Gaulle airport writing this while waiting for my flight on to London to board. This is a very modern terminal, and rather spoils the description of various college bars, etc., as being "like an airport departure lounge" by having an architecturally rather pleasant departure lounge. Having said this, while the roof structure looks nice, it is a large empty space and while nice and airy at seven o'clock in the morning it might be ratehr busy and crowded if all the gates were in use.
This will be the shortest flight I've ever been on, hopping over the Channel to london. It's a shame it's cloudy.
[1] Small in that there was probably an average of one or two jet aircraft per hour[2]
[2] Yes, I know that a turbo-prop is a jet engine, but you know what I mean.....
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Later:
Home now. Which is very nice. The flight from Paris to London involved 20 min taxiing around Charles De Gaulle, about 30 mins in the air going somewhere, and another 20 mins going round in circles over outer London. This is an activity which will be familiar to anyone who flies into Heathrow, but is more irritating when it doubles the length of the flight!
I haven't decided on the future of this diary. Now that I'm not cruising there won't be the same material on destinations that featured so heavily until I found out how boring carribean cruising is, and there probably won't be the same degree of whinging when I have real people to whinge at instead. But I have liked being able to record random observations, etc.. So maybe I'll keep it going in some form. Watch this space.
-Simon.
posted by Simon Thursday, January 22, 2004