Oh I hate flying

It was a nice day - well cold and overcast - at Bordeaux. The plane was on time. I was sat right by the front door so I had lots of legroom. It was an Airbus A319, and I do prefer Airbus to Boeing. The flight was smooth and I enjoyed looking down through the blue skies onto the coast of Brittany, then Torbay, then the Bristol Channel with Flat Holm and Steep Holm. The landing was very smooth. Everything was fine.

But I just hate flying !

I brought the GPS with me and realised when it said that Britsol Airport to Cardiff was 695 miles that something probably needed reprogramming. I changed its settings and things went a lot better from then on. It had been trying to direct me from Bristol Airport to Cardiff via the Bordeaux Rocade.

I have realised that our masterplan of me contacting the family by Skype using McDonalds free wifi is flawed in that it depends on me finding a McDonalds at the time the family are at home together. Hmm.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit about music exams in UK and France

They're really different. I think I have already mentioned that while in the UK people generally find a private teacher for their instrument, or do it through a school scheme, here there are municipal music school, conservatoires and so on. The situation is a little more complex than I had first understood, because the schools vary in the rigidity of their organisation: the most, the conservatoires, next the municipals, then the associations. Our music school is an association, but it tends to apply the standards of the municipal schools with its programme of cycles, etc. Britain - grade 1 to 8, grade 8 being roughly equivalent to A-level, pre university/conservatoire. France - 3 cycles, each taking about 4 years, with 3ème cycle being roughly equivalent to grade 8. Theory of music - UK to take grade 8 you need theory grade 5. In France you study theory alongside your instrumental studies, very slowly. Catrin's flute music is MUCH more difficult than the stuff she does in theor
Read more

A brief sortie to North Wales

 Following the Great Keswick Debacle, when our volunteering at the Keswick café was sabotaged by our assorted indispositions, we had airline tickets to use up. Yes, we had not taken travel insurance, so we paid even more money to change our tickets to fly for a short visit to North Wales. This time we were able to go. We passed extremely slowly through a very crowded Bordeaux airport but in good time to get our plane. All seats in the terminal were taken so we leaned against whatever we could find while waiting to board. Hey, bags need seats, too! though sometimes pointing out to Pat, "No, that's a bag seat", makes the bag find a new refuge on the lap of the person sitting next to it... Once on the plane we quickly found our allocated seats - right at the back on the left hand side - stowed our bags and the flight was smooth and uneventful.  We had 30 minutes in Manchester to disembark, get through immigration , hustle off to the station and board our train for Shotton. I
Read more