The adventure begins

This is being written in a London hotel room on Thursday 22nd July, although I have no idea when it will be posted. Alas, this particular hotel does not yet embrace free Wi-Fi for the customers. Nor indeed do they offer normal-sized beds: their 'double bed' was slightly wider than a single and hardly useful when you need a decent night's sleep. After a brief conversation with Zan at reception during which I pointed out (a) a double-bed should comfortably accommodate two adults and (b) I was not being anywhere near as obnoxious as the shouting person to my left, we got an upgrade! On a different floor we now have nicer paintings on the walls, a better standard of furnishing, twice the size of room and importantly, a much larger bed!

This was a good point to the day – there is better to come. The day started with the last of our farewells when Alison's parents dropped us off at Belfast City Airport. As you will appreciate, a week of non-stop farewells is pretty draining but the smiling face of John Hamilton, who talked us into this adventure in the first place, to meet us in the airport was a welcome sight. Alas, even John's silver tongue could not persuade BMI's check-in staff that their baggage policies were rather strange: our luggage would have been within limit if we had distributed the weight over three bags, but we had followed their website's guidance and only used two bags (one per person), so were over the limit and they could not exercise any discretion. Strangely, they don't even care what weight your hand-luggage is (I'll pack my rucksack with lead next time). For future reference, we decided to ignore whatever the airlines say on their websites from now on and talk to a human being. No, she couldn't bend the rules and we paid up. Before you ask, no, we didn't have time to buy a cheap bag and re-pack! But, with our new resolution to talk to humans in mind, it got better (see below).

However, I would like to thank BMI for giving us such an entertaining, roller-coaster-esque flight to Heathrow. It's not their fault – the weather varied all over the UK and as a result we had a few ups and downs and “waheyy!” roller-coaster moments. Unfortunately, the lady next to us didn't enjoy it so much and spent the last half of the flight in silence, including the aborted landing due to issues on the ground, looking terrified. The Aussie kid in front said it reminded him of Lunar Park (it reminded us more of Rita, Queen of Speed at Alton Towers).

After checking in (and blagging a 4-star room – not bad for the no-frills web-tariff we started on) we returned to the airport to see what the nice people at Swiss Air thought of our luggage issues and to see what could be done before tomorrow's check-in. Their web site makes it clear that each of us can have a single 23kg case plus 8kg of hand-luggage and we knew we were a wee bit over their limits so were resigned to paying the fee. No problem though – lovely ticket-desk lady waves her magic wand and we are given two 23kg bags each. Or, a whopping total of 92 kg over 4 bags. Result!! So, as Clarke writes this Alison is redistributing stuff with the cheap but durable holdall bought from the lovely people at Excess Baggage, Terminal 1.

So, after celebrating with a reasonably-priced evening meal in the airport we got a free London bus to the hotel (did you know the buses in the Heathrow area are free? No, neither did we!), where Clarke typed this while Alison re-packed.

Tomorrow: Up at 0500 to fly to Zurich; meet Don Brubaker (another RFIS teacher) in Zurich airport; fly to Yaoundé, Cameroon; meet the neighbours.