Panic on a Plane

Earlier this year I enrolled on an online course through Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education. Our tutor set us several tasks over the duration of the course to write short pieces using 250 words or fewer. My efforts will appear in this post and subsequent others.

The first piece we had to write was about our most memorable travel experience. I based mine on the trip Juliet and I did to Australia and New Zealand in January/February 2016.

13th January 2016 arrived. The day my wife and I were setting off on a “trip of a lifetime” to use a well worn metaphor. I’m not superstitious but at least it wasn’t a Friday!

We were off to join a cruise ship in Sydney for a 16 night trip to Auckland, but first we had to get there. As we were going so far we decided to travel Business Class from Heathrow with a brief stop in Hong Kong to change planes. So far so good, great flight, lovely cabin crew who looked after us well, managed to get a bit of sleep on the overnight flight. Just as we were about to gather our things together for leaving the aircraft my wife asked if I had her passport.

A rummage around all her bits and pieces she had with her for the flight and a search amongst my things and no sign of it. A mild panic was beginning to set in. We had 90 minutes between arrival and departure of our connecting flight. Obviously she had it when we boarded as we had to show passports at the gate in London so it was somewhere on the plane. The cabin crew had a look for us, initially with no success, however, one of them scrambled on the floor and looked under the seat in front and turned up trumps. Prior to this I thought that our holiday would be over before it started.

This episode only left us 45 minutes to get off the plane and get to the gate for the connecting flight – but we made it. Apart from this “incident” the holiday lived up to our expectations.

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