We made it! We are
finally in the air! Due to very wintery weather, Pieter and I had decided to
spend the night with Alexandra and Andronikos in Old Aberdeen, enabling us to
have an early start. Conditions were very wintery indeed as we hit the road,
close to a whiteout, but things cleared up between Dundee and Stirling. We
arrived RAF Brize Norton, the UK’s largest military airbase, even 2 h ahead of
our own schedule, but that sure was not a bad thing – and Aldo joint us shortly
afterwards, arriving by Eurostar from Paris via London and Oxford. We were the
first passengers for our flight in the terminal – 6 h before departure! While
waiting in the empty lounge, I got a SKYPE message from Kay McCallum in
Stanley, our destination – the 2 shops there had temporarily run out of plain
flour, so I quickly left the airbase and got her a bag from a local store: Aldo
still had space in his suitcase. Anywhere else, this would be a trivial problem
to solve, but supplying the Falklands is anything but!
As we boarded the
plane, I realized that my seat 4A was in Business Class – very lucky, and even
luckier, the seat next to me was unallocated, so I got Alexandra to join me and
abandon her Tourist Class seat in the back of the plane. Αυτό λέγεται κωλοφαρδία, μου έμαθε! Two Business seats for an overnight flight to
the other side of the planet, really couldn’t be better!!
Looking from my
window, I could see a splendid, almost-full moon and the Orion over a magic,
snow-covered English landscape as we escaped the European winter. Hot Ascension
Island is now awaiting us! Lots of thoughts and memories were going through my
mind, for many years the Falklands and Antarctica had been the ultimate dream
destination of my life – and this was now already my 4th trip to the
region and almost certainly more to come.
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