Getting there is NOT half the fun!

Well, I'm just back from my ski trip in Austria. Next time we go on a ski trip, I think I'm definitely going to try to convince the lads to fly into the same country as we're actually skiing in! To get to Zell Am See in Austria, we flew into Munich in Germany. I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to catch an 8:30am flight. Normally I don't mind doing that if I'm going somewhere on the far side of the globe, but Germany? You're barely out of your own timezone there, is way to early in the morning to be doing that! The majority rules tho, and in our group, the majority said we fly early :-

The plan was to get to Munich at around 11:30, hop on the bus we'd hired for a "quick" 2 1/2 hour trip to Zell, settle in and have a couple of hours to spare before we headed down to the irish bar to watch the Ireland Scotland rugby match at 7 to grab our gear, get some food and generally settle in. What we didn't realise before we set out tho was that the week we were going coincided with mid-term break in Holland, and it seems if you're Dutch, the thing to do on mid-term is to head to Austria skiing. So, the whole of Holland seemed to be heading in the same direction as us, the autobahns were choc-a-block with NL-plated cars, and at one stage on the radio we heard there was a 16km long tailback outside Munich! Luckily our bus driver knew the score,and we spent the whole trip on back-roads and side-roads, seeing a lot more of rural Germany than normal tourists do (and I can see why they don't bother with it). The only time we got on the autobahn we took 20mins to get 1km between intersections! So, what on a normal day would have been a nice easy 2, maybe 2 1/2hr trip turned into a 3 1/2hr odyssey.

On our way back, we discovered that Newton's 1st law also applies to traffic: just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so for every mass Dutch migration to the ski slopes there is an equal and opposite mass migration home at the end of the week. And once again we got caught in the middle of it. At least on the way out we didn't really have a deadline to keep, but on the way back we had a flight to catch! So, we arranged for the bus to pick us up way way in advance of what we thought we'd need - 1:45pm for a 7:40pm flight. This time though, some of our tulip-growing pot-smoking cousins seem to have gotten wise to the fact that the autobahn was a recipe for creeping disaster, and so transferred some of the traffic jams and tailbacks onto some of our back roads. It also didn't help that there'd been a big-ass storm the night before so a lot of the roads the driver was planning on taking were blocked by fallen trees, forcing us to take detours. As a result, we arrived at Munchen airport just in time to catch the tail end of the check-in queue! At least we made it I guess.

Having said that, we could have easily taken our time a bit more. I read a statistic somewhere the other week saying that on average about 30% of flights take off late from the major european airports, and this was one of our chances to add to those statistics. We started boarding at about the time we should have been taking off, which is generally par for the course on any flight, but then when we were all nice and comfy and had buckled up and noted the location of our nearest emergency exits (bearing in mind that the nearest exit may be behind us) and ready to go..... nothing. We get an announcement from the cockpit that we'd lost our take-off slot and had to wait for the tower to give us another one - which would be at least a half-hour delay. Half an hour later(ish), we started moving, and eventually got into the air, where we immediately seemed to hit a headwind which stayed with us most of the way over. As a result, what should have been a 9:30pm landing into Dublin turned into an 11:15pm one, and I crawled into my flat just after midnight.

Next year, if we're going to Italy, we fly into Italy and not Switzerland 'cos the flight happens to be €40 cheaper!