Beyond Selidor

Oh wow, I was reading your Gatwick debacle almost between my fingers in horror. I'm in awe at your composure throughout the whole thing (although well done to you for remaining friendly and polite to the airline staff — to be honest I think they were primed to be more helpful to you because you didn't degenerate into a tantrum-y meltdown; air travel seems to bring out the worst in people. I love that you ended up basically not much worse off financially than you started, and with some delicious Baileys to boot!

i think i spent about 12 hours in Gatwick that day. (there are worse airports to spend 12 hours in.

Okay, this really made me laugh, because one anecdote that I didn't include was from the same trip that involved missing the flight in Hong Kong and getting pickpocketted in Rome (the whole trip was: Sydney to Amsterdam via Hong Kong, immediate Thalys train to Paris, back to Amsterdam after Paris, then Dublin and the west of Ireland, then Rome via Gatwick, then London, then home to Sydney). As you can see from that itinerary, we had a stopover in Gatwick between Dublin and Rome. It was going to last about twelve hours, and our original plan was to go into London for the day, have lunch, then go back out to Gatwick for our second flight.

However, this was in December, something like ten flakes of snow fell in the UK, and the entire rail network ground to a halt and no trains were leaving Gatwick, so we had to stay in the airport. We loathe air travel and airports, and spent most of the day wandering around endlessly (my mother hates sitting down), growing increasingly bored and grumpy. At one point we got so distracted that we left the plastic sleeve envelope with all our printed itinerary, booking confirmations, receipts etc on the shelf of a W H Smith we'd been browsing and had to run back in a panic. And then after all that our flight to Rome was massively delayed by the weather and we got there after midnight instead of at 8 or 9pm as planned. So 'twelve hours in Gatwick' has become a sort of family short-hand for 'a hellish situation.'

As to your family's missed flight in Iceland, I can only look on in horror. How incredibly stressful! I've never had a mishap like that (misreading times/dates), and other than the thing in Hong Kong, the worst of that that's ever happened to a member of my family is my sister somehow misreading a flight booking written in 24-hour time and showing up to the airport two hours late (it said something like 1630 and she somehow translated that in her head to '6.30pm'), but it was just a domestic flight within Australia and they put her on the next flight, which left within the hour.