Sorry that I've not been here blogging for the last week. Last week was incredibly busy, but then Mr C and I had a nice, peaceful weekend away planned. We flew out to Vienna last Friday and had a great weekend exploring the city. The slight problem came on Monday. After watching the news in our hotel room that morning there was no surprise when we turned up at the airport to find that our flight back to London was cancelled. In fact, no flights left Austria for London at all that day due to the snow back home!
We'd flown with Easyjet and the truth behind those cheap flights is that if something goes wrong you're on your own! Easyjet will not move you to another airline and will therefore only fly you back home on one of their flights. They only fly to Vienna and back once a day and the following day's flight was already fully booked. This meant that they may have been able to get us out on Wednesday, possibly Thursday. Easyjet weren't going to pay for any hotel costs, but would refund the cost of the flight (only about £60 as we'd booked them so in advance).
A call to my travel insurance company told me that no one in the travel claims department had managed to get into work, so they weren't able to advise me on whether I could claim for travelling back via another route. We only had Monday booked off work this week, so we had to make some quick decisions about what to do. We also figured out that we'd actually be out of pocket as well if we had to start using up our leave allowance from work.
In the end we flew early Monday evening from Vienna to Brussels where we got a hotel for the night. We also managed to book a Eurostar ticket back to St Pancras for lunchtime today. The weather forecast at the time predicted more snow for overnight on Monday so the idea of flying back to the UK seemed a bit silly. This plan also had the extra benefit that we managed to catch up with two old friends that live in Brussels who we'd not seen seen since our wedding in March last year.
Luckily the plan held together pretty well and we were only 5 minutes late arriving back in London today. Both of us even managed to get into work this afternoon (if dressed much more casually than usual!) having gone straight there from the station. Now that we're home after work it feels good to be back home – and now I'm looking forward to a night's sleep in my own bed.
Pictures and the full story of the trip to Vienna will follow – just as soon as I've caught up on critical things like washing and shopping!
What an adventure! I’m looking forward to seeing the photographs as I’ve never been to Vienna. We have the opposite problem – booked to fly out to New York on Thursday but more snow forecast.
Oh no! Fingers crossed for Thursday.
One thing that I would suggest is making sure that you’ve got some good travel insurance, and also a handy list of phone numbers/ websites for contingency plans (airlines, hotels etc) We generally found that by moving fast we were able to do things, yet if we’d hung around at the mercy of others I think we would still be in Vienna!