Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

That's right. Flying is stressful. Not the actual flying part, although watching a news story about a plane crash while flying doesn't build confidence.

No, the stressful part is the fact that a) there is only one flight a day to my local airport, and b) I did not have ONE FLIGHT leave on time the whole weekend. When you're catching 4 planes in 4 days, and have certain connections to meet, flights leaving on time is important. I've caught planes before, lots of times. It's the short connections that stress me. Anything under 2 hours is not long enough in my book.

My first flight was only a few minutes late. Congestion at Brisbane we were told. Oops! That's ok, I had a 50 minute change over in Brisbane, plenty of time to be 5 or even 10 minutes late. Which we were.

Second flight to Sydney, well. Apparently it was windy in Sydney on Friday, so one runway was closed. This meant certain flights were cancelled. Thankfully not mine. Although this did mean a certain amount of juggling was required to get everyone from the cancelled flights onto other flights, including mine, meaning we left late. And had to wait to land. Half an hour late.

Coming home the flight was scheduled to leave at 8:30am. To be checked in by 8am, I needed to leave the university at 6:13am on a bus to the train station. I thought I would have plenty of time, but I got on the bus, walked straight onto the train, changed trains and never had more than a minute of waiting on a platform before arriving at the airport and checking in by 7:55am! Phew, that was close.

Apparently not. Still windy, so one runway again, meaning incoming flight was 30 minutes late. Not to worry, we should only leave 5 minutes late.

Or not. Due to leave at 8:30am, we boarded the plane at 9am, which was when we found out what the problem was - lack of runways, so a delay. Oh and by the way it's really windy in Brisbane too, so landings are delayed, so we need to take on extra fuel (operational requirement of Brisbane airport - fair call I say. I've seen Die Hard 2). And as we're waiting, waiting, waiting, I'm starting to panic. I only had 40 minutes in Brisbane to change flights. Thankfully I had no luggage checked to worry about, but still, I didn't have a watch so no real idea of the time. I eventually was stressing so much, cause Hubby had told me about Kiki being sick, but I didn't know how sick, I asked what the plan would be. By this stage it was nearly 9:30, and even with a 60 minute flight, making a 10:35 flight would be tough. Thankfully there was nearly 30 people on the plane for the connecting flight. Holding the other flight until we made it would be cheaper than accomodating us on other flights and overnight (one flight a day remember). She did say that often if there's only one or two people they don't hold the plane.

Strangely thankful for school holidays, I relaxed a little, and we finally took off at 9:45. Not only had Virgin held the plane for us, but they'd moved the plane once all the other passengers were on board to the gate next to our arrival from Sydney, to get everyone (and luggage) on board quicker. Taking off 15 minutes late from Brisbane we were just 15 minutes late getting home.

But boy do I NOT want to go through that again. I'm also thankful next time I do that trip I'll just be going from Brisbane to Sydney. There's like 500 flights a day between Brisbane and Sydney. And I'm sure that's not much of an exaggeration.

So am I the only one, or does this sort of thing stress out other people too?