I was up early to pack and have breakfast, then I took Claudine to the airport for her flight to Manchester. I returned to collect my case and then went to the airport by train via the city centre to get a pack of special tea to take home to Clare.
From automated check-in and bag drop, through security clearance to the duty free shopping mall took 25 minutes, remarkably quick considering the numbers going through at the same time to catch their flights to America. The walk from the shops to the departure lounge then took fifteen minutes. EasyJet's flights are about as far as they can be from check-in. You get what you pay for, I guess.
I passed the time until boarding taking photos of arriving and departing aircraft. I couldn't help noticing that the only plane to get a police escort out to the runway was the El-Al flight to Israel. VIP aboard, or security angst? I wondered.
The Bristol 'plane arrived on time. I was amused to note its registration G-EZAZ - You gotta feel safe going home on this flight. There was a 20 minute delay to fix a minor technical problem, the pilot said. When he'd signed off the paperwork (at least five minutes worth of the delay), he announced; "Now that the aircraft is fully sensible, we can leave." An interesting turn of phrase, suggesting that the problem fixed was with one of the hundreds of sensors in the cockpit monitoring the aircraft's condition.
We took off flying east up lac Leman, and turned north over Divonne, where I preached on Sunday, to overfly the Jura. The sky was clear, the landscape was all green and gold and orange, capped with snow along the crests, a feast of beauty. By the time we were east of Paris, a thick layer of cloud lay beneath us, from horizon to horizon, and this persisted all the way home to Bristol. We saw the ground again only in the last few miles before touchdown just fifteen minutes late. With great bus and train connections I was home an hour and a half later.
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