Ashes to ashes - our holiday hell
Sunday, April 18, 2010 Gary Lineker is in the papers today after he "spent a gruelling 24 hours travelling by plane, car and train to make it back from Spain" in time to present Match Of The Day last night.
A friend of mine has also been on holiday in Spain with his family. Unlike the former England footballer, they are still there. Yesterday he emailed to say:
We are currently on the train to Madrid from Malaga and will stay in Madrid overnight. We have two days to make the 766 miles to Cherbourg.
One of our UK contacts has booked all six of us on a ferry journey from Cherbourg to Portsmouth Monday night so we should be on the UK mainland Tuesday morning.
Last night he emailed again to report a change of plan:
Looks like we are now competing with travellers from all over the world who want to land in Spain (southern Europe) and make their way overland home (Germany, Belgium etc, I have met them all).
So where are we? Well, the Cherbourg trip is out - all trains out of Madrid to France are booked. But we managed a confirmed booking to Paris from Madrid on Tuesday arriving at 2330hrs. But we had to pay cash to Spanish railways for the trip from the border part (they accepted a card for the Spain portion) into France because there might be a strike by the French.
We are waiting to hear if our tickets for the 0719 Eurostar on Wednesday from Paris into Kings Cross have come through. If not it may be Calais on foot. But at least we are closer to home.
This morning came the news that:
We are staying in Madrid until Tuesday morning. The cloud persists here in Madrid but we hope to be in Dover 1600hrs Wednesday. The Eurostar tickets which were £745 for all six of us last night were £1831 this morning. So we have booked a train from Paris Wednesday 0758hrs morning to Calais and then the ferry.
We also need to book a hotel v v near the station in Paris Tuesday night so we can leave 0700hrs Wed morning. The only potential problem we can see right now is a strike on the French side Tuesday afternoon.
My friend, who works in financial services, predicts that:
This volcanic thing is going to be bigger than 9/11 in terms of its economic effect. Watch the pound plummet Monday as a result of the Lib surge and this event.
On a personal note he adds: "I reckon we're £2k out on this gig so far and all it's done is figgin rain!"
Reader Comments (3)
This catastrophe reminds me of my mother's favourite saying which was "man proposes but God disposes".
When you hear of the nightmarish trip that holidaymakers are going through, not to mention the family above and the greedy unnecessary costs being lashed on to fares and now I just heard that french rail have gone on strike!
OMG I would have to be put in a straigh jacket if it happened to me.
I think I'll opt for a terra firma hol this year as the worry of not getting home if I go abroad would take the good out it.
Not to mention the expense!!
Could this volcanic eruption be retribution! For a small population,have they caused us Brits a lot of trouble. First the Vikings, raping and pilliging, then the Icelandic fishing dispute, stealing our cod, then the banking crisis losing people's cash, then the referendum voting not to pay it back and now their volcano threatening to bankrupt the airline industry!
Seriously though can anyone remember what happened in the 80s when Mount St. Helens erupted? I just cannot remember them grounding any flights and also what about Mount Etna that always seems to be grumbling and they don't ground flights so what is going on here? Is this the Met Office's conspiracy to prove that over the period that flights were grounded carbon emissions were drastically reduced thereby backing up their mantra that carbon emissions are man made? I would be interested to hear other people's views.
And why were they all grounded, well the met office produced a computer model of the volcanic ash, you know that same met office that produced the fiddled statistics on AGW. You only get out of a computer what you feed it.
A German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, reported the coincidence of volcano cloud stiopping all air traffic and a NATO maneuver called 'Brilliant Ardent 2010' the goal of this maneuver was to find out how Europe would react if a serious bombing on the nuclear facilities of Iran would happen.
http://info.kopp-verlag.de/news/enthuel ... piele.html