At last! An aeroplane!

We finally finished the longest "journey" ever, which started at 1530 on Thursday, when we left the flat in a taxi, and ended at 0030 on Saturday, when we settled in our hotel room in Munich. What nonsense!

Friday was a long day. Up with the larks to get back to the airport, only to wait for a delayed flight coming up from Luton. Eventually, our aeroplane arrived. What a relief. Down to Luton, and Mr A and I were first off the aeroplane and waiting for the luggage when C appeared to give the disconcerting news that someone had walked off the plane with K's backpack containing more or less all of his valuables. Luckily, it was an innocent mistake and the person had left their bag behind instead. The cabin crew looked inside it, and found that it was a person flying on to somewhere else about an hour later and it contained their boarding pass and ID card. Soon enough K found him on the departures concourse wandering around wondering what on earth to do. Thank goodness it wasn't someone who walked out of the airport.

So that little mishap didn't spoil our plan, which was to leave the airport and go for lunch rather than sitting around getting wound up. We got a taxi to a country pub in a nearby village and sat out in the beer garden having a good lunch for a couple of hours.

Even so, there was a fair amount of waiting around in the airport, not least as the flght itself was more than 1.5 hours late. I have to say I at least was on tenterhooks that it might be cancelled for precisely the same reason at yesterday's - i.e. the curfew in Munich. But it wasn't and the arrival was early enough for the plane to head back to Luton for its final segment of the day. Looking up the Edinburgh flight for Friday revealed that it did arrive - later than us, but wasn't flying back to Edinburgh. It seems that it was being scheduled for 15 hours later, at lunch time on Saturday, presumably to allow the flight crew to get sufficient rest, or to fly out another flight crew from somewhere else to take it back. There's no point in worrying about whether the flights will be similarly buggered up in a week's time when we are heading home. Let's now just settle down and enjoy this.

We blanched at the prospect of nearly 100 euros for a taxi, even shared between four, and did battle with the ticket machines to get the S bahn to Marienplatz, and hence a short walk to the hotel. The hotel is rather traditional and looks family owned. It's very central indeed. No air conditioning, but there is a fan in the room which was a lifesaver. When we booked the rooms in January, nobody thought about a heatwave in June, although perhaps we should have done. Had we done so, we might have gone for chain airconditioned bland.

Anyway, anyway, we're here now. Finally. Let's get on with this!