The Best-Laid Plans...

My last post was one I scheduled, and it describes what I'd planned to do...

Unfortunately, plans sometimes (ok, often) come unstuck...

The journey to Terminal 5 was much easier than expected, which meant that we arrived an hour earlier than our check-in time. Luckily for us, on our arrival at the Groups' check-in desk, someone had an attack of the smarts and realised that it was in her interests to check us in as quickly as possible, after which we would become "somebody else's problem" - 12 children in a group have this effect on people...

For the first time ever, I was subjected to a frisk search... to say that it was thorough was an understatement - one doesn't normally get that close to a person without an introduction..!

We hit pretty bad turbulence - the captain kept coming on the intercom to apologise, saying that he'd never experienced anything like it. Not the most reassuring of statements...!

Traffic out of Toulouse was a nightmare... the weather then took a turn for the worse, and it poured down with rain... suddenly there was a loud bang on the coach roof - I assumed we'd hit a low tree or something. This was rapidly followed by more bangs, as suddenly we were caught in a storm of hailstones.The hailstones were the size of golfballs. There was a small bridge across the road, and we saw that traffic under it had come to a complete standstill - no-one was prepared to drive out and get hit by hail. We were fortunate that it was a brief shower, but we saw a car which had had its rear windscreen smashed... and several cars had lots of small indents in the roofs where the hail had impacted with the sheet metal.The hotel staff had dinner waiting for us when we finally arrived, and it was great to meet them again. They really are a lovely bunch, and it was kind of them to stay late to cook and serve the meal - not all
hotels are so obliging.

I was able to distribute keys during the meal, but I was just too tired to go down for the end of the Torchlight Procession. I've now unpacked, and have checked tomorrow's programme... so I think it's time for sleep.

More tomorrow!