Honeymoon epilogue: The journey home

Our jour­ney home started with­out a hitch, up at 5:15am, packed, checked out and whisked to Chi­ang Mai air­port via our transfer.

After hang­ing around amongst thou­sands of mos­qui­tos wait­ing for the check-in desk to open, we deposited our lug­gage and ate our packed break­fast – hearty tuna sand­wiches. In the lounge we rem­i­nisced about our hol­i­day, sad that it was all over.

We took the 8:25am Air Asia flight to the famil­iar Suvarn­ab­humi air­port in Bangkok, touch­ing down an hour later.

One last pad thai and mango shake before we leave and then onto our 12:25pm flight home. 11 hours to Heathrow, London.

In flight enter­tain­ment was lack­ing, with­out per­sonal screens and only poorly posi­tioned mon­i­tors, we avoided watch­ing Avatar and instead amused our­selves, writ­ing about the hon­ey­moon, play­ing games and so-on.

An ardu­ous ten hours later, about 45 min­utes from home, the pilot informed us of some prob­lems. Because of a vol­cano erup­tion in Ice­land, and drift­ing ash, all Eng­lish air­ports were closed. So we’re being diverted–first thought was Paris CDG, but now we’re land­ing in Frank­furt! Get­ting home will now be interesting!

We made a big cir­cle in the sky and back-tracked to Frank­furt, Ger­many. Land­ing at approx 7pm local time. Our first thoughts were for our wed­ding gift list, meant to be deliv­ered at 7am the next morn­ing, in Brighton. Call­ing around, our fam­i­lies were amaz­ing – they’d sorted every­thing already and Amanda would be at the flat to pick every­thing up.

The next task: get­ting home. Paris would have been easy – trains, fer­ries, etc., lots of options. Being another 600km away meant our options would be limited.

At the air­port no-one really knew what to do. Some peo­ple went through pass­port con­trol by mis­take, the rest of us were guided by staff around in cir­cles a cou­ple of times–up and down esca­la­tors before find­ing us a depar­ture lounge. A Thai air­ways rep­re­sen­ta­tive will be with you shortly.

Two hours later and we had no rep­re­sen­ta­tive and no more infor­ma­tion. We lis­tened to savvy trav­ellers organ­is­ing trains or car rentals, we wanted to stick with them, but whilst Sam was grab­bing pro­vi­sions they made a dash for it.

On our own again we heard the Lufthansa spokes­woman give us the first tid­bits of infor­ma­tion. “Every­thing that could have gone wrong has gone wrong”. A light­ing con­fer­ence meant that all hotels were booked up and that we’d most likely be stay­ing on Frank­furt airport’s floors. At 10am tomor­row in C13 we will give you more infor­ma­tion, food will arrive shortly. If you do go, please leave your lug­gage here so we don’t have to check them through secu­rity again.

Whilst on her pro­vi­sions hunt, Sam found a cou­ple, just engaged, that had man­aged to book a hotel online. Using one of the expen­sive ter­mi­nals. If we did the same we could share a taxi and have a bed for the night. For seven fran­tic min­utes we attempted to book the hotel, watch­ing our euro credit drop by the sec­ond. Two dou­ble rooms left, 130 euros. Done.

We were off, through pass­port con­trol, to the bag­gage carousel, where all bags were ran­domly arranged, we could have gone into anyone’s suit­case. We grabbed the essen­tials, but couldn’t find the Euro­pean travel adapter, we quickly left the air­port and took a taxi to the city centre.

Frankfurt’s neon sky­line looked gor­geous against a crisp clear night.

The hotel was a poor IBIS imi­ta­tion, two sin­gles were pushed together badly to make a dou­ble, there was no com­pli­men­tary sham­poo and above all, no tea or cof­fee! Instead we gob­bled up the duty free Toblerone. At least we had a bed and rel­a­tive comfort.