Missed My Flights!

I just experienced an unexpected turn of an event. I missed my flight to a supposedly lovely holiday in Norway. And in my overall travel experience, this was the second time it happened. What a shame! I just can't believe it!

Last Friday, when driving to Stansted Airport, there was a long queue somewhere in M25 towards M11. At first, I thought I wasn't going to wait for very long but I think we were stuck there with very little movement for over an hour. Apparently, there was a tunnel refurbishment where only 2 lanes left allocated for an initial 4, hence the bottleneck happened. We reached the airport 5-10 mins before departure time and I was hoping for a miracle like a delay or something. We went through the customs and ran towards our boarding gate as quickly as we could, but it was already closed. I actually saw our plane moving away from us. Sigh. What can I say? We tried.

A few years ago, we were planning to go to Hainan, China. We reached the airport with plenty of time left to check in and things. The problem came when the check-in staff told us that we didn't have the valid visa to go into China. We argued that Hainan accepts visa on arrival to certain nationalities and ours was one of them. The staff checked for more information on her system but at the end, she still didn't let us go because she was sure that we would be sent back without the visa. Another sigh.

If I didn't miss my flight, I would have been in a boat by now enjoying and taking photos of a beautfiul fjord somewhere in Norway. Well, looking at the bright side of things, the weather forecast said that it would be raining on most days so I wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway. But still. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Now that you know my stories, I hope you can take away the good things out of this. Please be safe than sorry. Prepare plenty of time before you travel to check on things such as travel time, visa, etc. In the case of the visa story, if I knew that would be happening, I would have just applied for a normal visa or phoned the airplane company to confirm about it before hand. What's the point of us knowing about such a rule if the staff working at the airport doesn't. At the end of the day, we want to go to our holidays, not miss them.