Thursday, December 05, 2013

A Long Thursday

Just a quick post this Thursday. As I write this I'm watching TV (rest in peace, Mandela) from a hotel bed in Copenhagen. I flew here this morning for meetings together with the European Commissioner for Employment but our evening flights were cancelled due to a big storm affecting a big area of Sweden and Denmark as well as other countries. This was not good timing for me at all, as my mum arrived in Brussels this evening and Peter is going to Stockholm for a couple of days tomorrow morning.

I should have seen this coming last night (I knew about the storm of course and that we might be affected, but there was also another bad omen), when I realised at 11pm when attempting to check in online that my booking reservation had never been confirmed. I called our travel agent and it was sorted, but perhaps it was a sign...if you believe in those things which I don't really but sometimes you wonder...

And today almost as soon as we arrived there was talk about closing the bridge between Denmark and Sweden (we flew to Copenhagen and then crossed the bridge by car to go to Malmö and Lund). Usually the trains can keep on running in much worse weather conditions than the cars, but in the afternoon they announced there would be no trains after 16:00. At that stage we couldn't get to the train station in time so our only option was to take the ferry between Helsingborg and Helsingör (a bit further north so a bit calmer). Unfortunately the drive on both sides of the straight was longer than we thought and due to the strong winds we couldn't drive as quickly as normal (and sometimes there were falling branches hitting the car), and soon it was clear that we wouldn't make our flights. My colleagues' flights got cancelled quite early anyway, and soon my flight was cancelled too, so rather soon we didn't have to worry about catching flights anyway. We rerouted to a hotel in the city (everything at the airport was fully booked) and after dinner at the nearest place (Hard Rock Café - haven't been to one for years) and a visit to a 24/7 pharmacy for deodorants, toothbrush, etc., I'm now hoping to get some sleep despite the noisy winds outside. 

I'm booked for the 10:55 flight tomorrow, by which time the storm will have hopefully moved on, fingers crossed! 

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