Well, this weekend is not going to be my favourite one. It all started with the cancelled Eurostar trains, so I flew to Brussels instead. It wasn’t ideal but it was ok-ish as it wasn’t more expensive and I missed only a couple hours.
On Sunday, all went well, the snow was beautiful, the race was exciting, good day. I was looking forward to Monday, though, as I was keen on meeting my family and friends in Budapest. I’m going to stay there only for three days so I wanted to make the most of it.
Lajos, my friend in Brussels, took me to the airport. I gave him a sticker, he happily applied onto the back of his car. The check-in went smoothly and there was no indication of any delays, at this point, all seemed to be fine
Though my belt raised some suspicions, I got through security. An advertisement with Eddy Merckx: he’s still very popular in Belgium.
Things went downhill from here, however. First our flight to Frankfurt was delayed with an hour. That’s not too bad, but there were loads of people from a previous Frankfurt flight, who wanted to get on our flight but it wasn’t possible as it was full. Cheerful situation indeed.
Then it started to snow and we got stuck, in the plane, at the gate. First we weren’t allowed to leave (our take-off window closed) then we weren’t able to leave (the little tow-car had a malfunction, it as unable to move the plane). Spent an hour on the runway then finally, we were allowed to take off. Things went fine from here on and we landed in Frankfurt without problems.
I was quite happy to see that my flight to Budapest was delayed – it was supposed to take off a couple minutes prior to our arrival. I checked out the cafeteria and opted for a nice pair of frankfurter sausages (what else, really). The guy was really friendly and doubled my order, free-of-charge. Nice, I thought.
Then came the bad news. First, we were delayed and then the cancelled the flight altogether. Yey, we’re gonna spend the night in Frankfurt. Smashing.
They started to hand out taxi and hotel vouchers, mine was at the bottom of the landing card pile so I got my vouchers an hour and a half later, around 12:00 am. The taxi took me to very post hotel in downtown Frankfurt, the Westin Grand Hotel. It sounded and looked post but it soon turned out that they sent another 100 people from other cancelled flights there, so it took them another hour and a half to check us in. I got to bed at 2am. They told us to call Lufthansa’s info line to enquiry about our booking, however, it was either busy or I couldn’t get through to anybody. I went to sleep but as the first flight was to leave at 7.50am, I had to get up at 5am.
Smashing.
Yes, you guessed it right, I didn’t catch the morning flight but hopefully will be on the 1.15pm one. There are still a couple more hours, but this is nothing, compared to the previous, almost 24 hours. I’m supposed to fly back to Brussels on Friday, I’m a bit afraid, though, how am I gonna be able to do that. Please, keep your fingers crossed!
