Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Back in town

Filed under:

• General

— orudge @ 10/02/2008 8:02 pm

Well, the past few days have involved lots of travelling. Thursday was the day of our flight back to Britain, with the flight leaving Natal at about 6.30pm. However, I was awoken on Thursday morning with a couple of messages that did not seem to bode well: there was a problem with the car (which was thankfully fixed fairly quickly), and there was a demonstration of sorts on the main BR-101 road up to Natal, which meant that no traffic could get through. As a result, our taxi was going to be delayed. The estimate was for the demonstration to finish by 1pm, which meant our taxi would be an hour or so late, at 2pm. (The intention was to get the taxi at 1pm, arrive at the airport by about 3.30pm, in plenty of time for the 6.30pm flight.) Fortunately, the taxi did indeed arrive at 2pm, and we got to the airport by around 4.30pm, only to be confronted by what’s probably the longest queue I’ve ever seen (well, actually, the queue for the Blackpool concert in August was probably longer). I’m not quite sure why, but it was taking an awful long time to check everybody in for the flight (seemingly, the flight was the only one leaving the airport at that time, as all the other check-in desks were closed). After about an hour, we got to the front of the queue and checked in, as well as having to stump up money for the departure tax (which seemed to be included in the flight price the last time I flew from Brazil, but apparently not this time). Once we finally got into the departure lounge, it turns out the plane was late due to it being late setting off from London earlier in the day. Anyway, eventually, we got on the plane, and the plane took off, and we flew back over to Britain. As usual, I didn’t manage to get any sleep on the flight, which made the 250 mile drive back up to North Wales fun. Particularly fun when the M40 ground to a halt due to an earlier accident. Thankfully, we were only delayed for perhaps half an hour there, and the rest of the drive was fine enough. Yesterday, after 14 hours sleep, I then drove up to St Andrews, which was really rather pleasant – the weather was lovely and there weren’t many cars on the road (and even less lorries). So that’s me back in St Andrews, with semester 2 starting tomorrow.

I’ve now flown a total of just under 56,000 miles in my life, it seems. The map is below (click for more details):

Still got to cover Africa, Asia and Australasia!