The trials of travelling

Today was a bad travel day.  It started out okay with a two and a half hour drive up to Limoges airport.  However, the flight from Limoges to Manchester (from where I was due to catch a second flight over to Belfast) was delayed and then delayed again. Now, the departure lounge is small at Limoges, it is a little airport designed to handle one incoming and one outgoing flight at a time, a bit like a one-track railway station.  So, when the passengers from our flight were joined by those waiting for a later flight (we should have been long gone by then) it became a squashed and overheated bedlam.  Then the two incoming flights arrived within 5 minutes of each other and no-one in the swarming melee knew who was to board which plane from which door.  We eventually got it sorted out in a clambering over each other, elbows out kind of way and the flight to Manchester took off two hours late. I had booked an upgrade into the executive lounge at Manchester Airport to while away the stopover time between flights and was hoping to have a bite to eat there.  But it was becoming clearer and clearer that we were not going to arrive in time for me to use it.  We finally landed at Manchester two hours and twenty minutes late after what the pilot described as "slightly strange routing".  Grab the bag, sprint down the corridor, see a large splodge of people blocking the corridor.  Oh no, it's a horrendous queue for passport control, a very long and very slow moving queue.  I began looking at my watch every thirty seconds or so, willing things to move just a little bit faster.  Eventually I got to the top of the queue, went through the little gate, laid my passport on the scanner, stared into the screen.  But the automatic scanner decided not to recognise me as a match for my passport photo, so I had to back out, under barked instructions from a uniformed person, and join a "manual" queue. More delay. I finally got through this with the clock now ticking down fast and made my way as quickly as I could to the security baggage check at Terminal 3.  Another massive queue, again moving at snail speed and the clock moving perilously close to the gate closing time for my next flight. I explained my plight (and my about to miss flight) to an attendant who very kindly lifted the tapes and allowed me into the fast track queue.  Still it was slow, but I did get through (after full body screening, in the high-tech thingy that looks like a tanning booth, and a manual pat down), put my belt and shoes and watch back on, gathered up all my bits and bobs and sprinted for the Belfast flight.  I arrived at the gate just in time!  Phew.  No gentle downtime in the executive lounge, no nice food, no nice glass of wine.  We boarded, we belted up, we took off and the flight was uneventful.  We touched down at 8.30pm, 11 eventful hours after I left home.  I was getting hungry, I hadn't eaten since noon French time.  I had arranged for a family member to pick me up from the airport so I texted him  to say that I had arrived. No-one showed. I texted again and rang him to say that I was waiting in the pickup area.  Still no show. Then my phone rang - he had gone to the wrong airport!!!  So I queued for a taxi which wafted me home, but I had to go straight back out again to the supermarket to get some food and, yes you guessed it, a bottle of wine.