Skiing at Christmas - the prologue

We at Bogun Towers have been rubbing our hands in anticipation of this most recent skiing trip with the Pofydd , Nia, Tudur , Christine and Chris
for some time with great excitement at the material that should be made available for out use and your delectation.

With everyone congregating at our kid’s flat in Brum on the last Friday before Christmas their journeys were of varying quality but on arrival with some rejuvenative mulled wine, beers, good humour and haggis spirits were much improved and a good dose of banter was engaged in and the process of briefing Nia and Tudur on all of our kid’s stories was begun.

A very short night’s sleep was had by all before the 0415 alarm call for their flight. Some grumpiness was to be expected but the gentle sense of keen excitement overcame all of that. However Birmingham airport quickly quashed that, the check-in queue was relatively short although it ended with the rather amusing news that despite already paying for his skis to be transported BMI had decided they wanted another £30 or he could whistle Dixie but these little bumps in the road are to be expected.

The queue for security which wound all the way around the terminal was less expected and certainly unwelcome leaving no time for breakfast before boarding. Of course some idiot had decided to try and get his boots on board as hand luggage and had to be sent back to check them in which caused 30 minutes of delay. Eventually a new slot was found and the plane started to trundle down the taxiway but then broke down. 30 minutes later the engineer gave up and they were de-planed ready to be loaded on another plane. Now our kid is a forgiving sort and understands these things happen but the captain decided to lie (presumably to avoid the bad PR of admitting the plane was broken) and claim that the decision to re-plane them was for “operational” reasons due to fuel. A complete load of hogwash…his lies were not helped by the ground-staff announcing that the problem was indeed a knackered plane.

As one can imagine the party’s confidence in BMI was somewhat shaken at this stage and matters were not much improved when this bus turned up as their replacement flight.