Happy Travelling Birthday James!

Another plane, another blog. Today is James’ 60th birthday and he has had a pleasant day; breakfasting at our lovely Bellevue Hotel, going for a stroll around the village, and lunching at the Arlberg Hotel just down the road. We have spent the afternoon and will spend the evening on our journey homewards to Scotland, however James enjoys a plane journey so that’s good too! Heather and Ewan have given him the extremely generous gift of a trip on a seaplane around the Scottish Islands and I get to go too, so we were both delighted! He got quite a few Happy Birthday messages over the course of the day. 

Despite much rumour and innuendo at the airport - all nonsense - we are currently seated on time in our plane to Edinburgh, waiting for our plane to be de-iced. Our journey to Innsbruck Airport was, however, not without incident. As our bus driver carefully drove through one of the semi-tunnels between Lech and St Anton, a car driver ran right into the back of our bus. At first I thought that we had simply scraped against the wall of the tunnel, but when we moved off in order to stop again at a sort of lay-by down the road (because we had been blocking half of the road) we saw the guy who had run into us. Boy, his car was a mess, all crumpled at the front. We had to wait for the police to arrive before we were allowed to continue our journey, by which time we were running about two hours late. This was of justified concern to the passengers who were travelling to earlier flights than ours, but we were still in good time because our flight was due to leave a bit later at 18.55 (Austrian time.) Maybe it’s because James and I have been lucky enough to travel a lot over the years by “planes, trains and automobiles” to quote the old Steve Martin and John Candy film, but I was unmoved by the rumour that due to the snow we would all be bussed to Munich once we got through departures. It’s true that quite a few flights were delayed, one until the next day, and that some passengers on other flights were indeed being bussed to Munich, but there is no point in getting ahead of yourself in my experience. Que sera sera. And sure enough, after standing in several very long (but moving) queues we were sent onto a bus which took us, not to Munich, but the short distance across the tarmac to our plane bound for Edinburgh. Our pilot has just thanked us for going on our holidays in these Covid times, which of course is important for the livelihood of the staff in the airline industry, which was nice to hear. I must go as we will be taking off shortly.