A flight to remember or hopefully to forget...

Yesterday I have little to show photographically as we were travelling most of the day. I jus managed to take a couple shots from the plane as we took off from Izmir Airport. I’ve looked on Google Earth but been unable to identify the stretch of water unless it is one of the river tributaries leading in from the Aegean Sea. As you can see there are dark clouds around and in fact this was the first rain we had seen in ten days in turkey so we were very lucky.

It was still raining when we arrived in Istanbul and our transit there proved to be rather nightmarish. Our travel company had not really left enough time to deal with the exigencies of Istanbul Airport – massive queues at Passport Control. We should have been well warned as when we disembarked there when we first arrived. the queues at passport control were horrendous. Our flight was ten minutes late. We had travelled from Izmir to Istanbul in an Airbus 330, very comfy but it took ages for the three hundred or more passengers to be disgorged and we unfortunately were towards the back. Then after running through to the international terminal we hit the queue at passport control. We managed to move up the queue a bit before hitting the zigzags but then had to take our turn . We eventually got through with about ten minutes to spare before our flight was due to leave and about twenty minutes after the gate should have shut. We literally ran to our departure gate, which, of course, was at about the furthest point of the terminal and just managed to catch the plane with literally a minute or so to spare. We flopped into our seats relieved but with our chests literally heaving. Not an experience we I would wish to repeat as normally we always arrive at airports with plenty of time to spare.