The train from St. Pancras to Luton Airport was just £4, which I consider a bargain. That damaged chair has been like that for months, not that it’s something I have spent a great deal of time contemplating and it has become something of a familiar friend now.
The usual Thameslink train, no tables or power outlets, but they just about always have lots of seats available and the services are usually reliable.
My usual order at Big Smoke at Luton Airport, this time they didn’t accidentally overcharge me. The beer is the Electric Eye from Big Smoke themselves, a punchy citrus beer.
A pint of Menabrea and a Limoncello at Nolito. The lager was generic, clean and dull, the Limoncello not the most decadent. But the environment was comfortable and thanks to Priority Pass for funding this visit.
And then ready to board and they had a helpful staff member checking the larger bags for size, but he was letting quite a lot off that were just a little too big in an attempt to be helpful. One lady had a suitcase that would fit a hippo in and he said it was ridiculously large, but the lady said that she was Albanian and wouldn’t be paying. After some discussions and translations from other passengers, it was agreed that she had a bag within her bag, so she just had to leave the larger bag at the gate.
We all then get the boarding passes scanned and go to a different part of the room, which is barriered off from the previous part, but it’s possible to pass things over. And, back to our lady with the bag, she started to get another passenger who still hadn’t checked-in to have a look through her now discarded bag to see if there was anything she had missed. The team member was now annoyed, it gave the impression that she thought she could get the bag back over the gated area when he wasn’t looking. He went to hide the bag.
It’s the aircraft on the right, which is G-WUKV, an Airbus A321 which took me back from Kaunas a couple of weeks ago.
The boarding starts.
The seating Gods had given me a middle seat which felt sub-optimal, but I’d had a good run of being given aisle or window seats. So, I was surprised and delighted to discover that the seat they had given me was actually an emergency exit row seat.
The crew member quickly discovered that the woman in the window seat couldn’t speak English, so I was swapped with her as I obviously look good in an emergency. And I speak English, so she could explain my responsibilities. The rest of the flight was bloody awful. I’ve never experienced such noise from kids on an aircraft, I was fortunate my headphones meant I could ignore most of that. I had a kid behind kicking the seat, but his father gave me some Pringles, so I tolerated that as I’m easy to bribe. The crew struggled to keep passengers from standing up the second we landed and there was no shortage of eye rolling from the crew about the situation. The crew were impeccable, they had a lot to deal with on this flight and I was thinking about writing to the Pope to see if a couple could be made saints.
I was only mildly traumatised by the time we landed in Tirana. Border control couldn’t have been any faster, it involved going through an e-gate without seeing any border agents and my passport didn’t need stamping.
It wasn’t the most quiet and relaxed airport terminal I’d been through. The flight cost £8.99 which is impressive, but this was not the most relaxing of experiences to say the least.