Homeward bound

Thanks to having booked an afternoon flight, I had the leisure of a whole morning to pack, strip the bed, take the recycling and rubbish out to the collecting point nearby, before walking to Montreux gare. I got there and booked my ticket early enough to catch the through train to Geneva airport, but found this had been cancelled, and replaced by a stopping train as far as Lausanne, where a choice of trains would to get me there would be possible. I think there are at least four every hour. I didn't need to catch this, but thought - what if the train 20 minutes later I planned to catch was cancelled as well? Whatever the reason for one cancellation, there's no guarantee it won't be followed by another, so I took the stopping train.

As far as Vevey, I chatted to a lady whom I had met while queueing to buy a ticket. She asked me if the ticket office did a money changing service, and I said that I thought not. She boarded the train at the same time as I did, and needed reassurance about when the train reached Vevey. I think she had not travelled on this line before. She was on the way to visit a friend, and had come from Germany. If she came via Basel and Lausanne, she may have missed her stop and needed to double back. We spoke in French and she told me she was from South America. I couldn't resist speaking a few words of Spanish as we parted company, and this raised a smile.

In Lausanne, I had to change platforms, then ten minutes later, the train arrived which I had intended to catch, and by two o'clock, three quarters of an hour later, I was queueing at the EasyJet bag drop with the returning skiers, many looking tired or hung over. Already a hundred people were waiting, but the staff managed the increasing numbers checking in so well that I only waited fifteen minutes. There were no queues at all at the security clearance gates. I guess people checked in ahead of me may have chose to eat lunch or drink before going through. I'd eaten on the train, so went into the departures area to wait the hour until the boarding gate was announced, time which quickly passed doing my Duolingo French and Spanish drills for the day, and sending messages.

You're told to allow twenty minutes to walk from the Departures area to the gate 'island' EasyJet uses for departing flights. This includes time for passport control, where there can be queues, but all four 

duty officers were unoccupied when I passed through. Time seemed to pass quickly and boarding began ten minutes early, which is understandable, as the flight was full, and many passengers had brought bulky hand baggage on board, some of which had to be relegated to the hold, adding time to the departure process. 

Even so, we left on time and flew all the way to Bristol over continuous cloud cover as the sun was setting. The pilot told us that the aircraft would turn west north of Gatwick and roughly follow the M4 most of the rest of the way. Watching the sun move from the window I was sitting beside, to the window ahead of me, was the only time in the flight I had a rough idea of journey progress. 

When we landed, we were delayed from disembarkation by some problem with the mobile stairs, which approached the aircraft and stopped short, where attempts were make to get the height of approach and ramp extension correct. It made me wonder if the person driving the machine was uncertain of what they were doing. This had the pilot call for another set of steps to be fetched for disembarking from the rear door. It was an amusing episode, which at least gave some passengers time to get their coats on, and cabin bags out ready to move.

It's the second time in six months that I've flown out of and into Bristol, and had to use the ePassport gates. These are now so slick and quick, I didn't expect to be through so  quick. The technology used previously for the ePassport gates has been replaced, and the number of booths doubled. I'd hazard a guess that rather than a local face recognition scan being compared initially to the national passport database, it's linked to an airport server containing the passport details of all on the passenger list for the flight in question. All this information is available to take advantage of from the moment anyone checks in for their flight. But, it does require a huge amount of reliable computing resources. Fine it it works, chaos when it doesn't.

Bus then to Temple Meads Station and a convenient train to Cardiff and bus to Pontcanna. Home in time for the Archers, and supper at the usual time, with thankfully, no mail needing attention, just my Windows 10 PC's in need of updating. After a month or longer away, this is always an irksome task taking hours, or get caught out later when you really need to use one quickly. Thank heavens for instantly updating Chromebook, despite its few minor irritations. I'll sleep well tonight.