Scotland – Day 1

I set off for Scotland starting at noon central standard time on Saturday, August 5th. My travel partner was Becky, whom I mentioned in a previous posting. In order to get to Edinburgh, I needed to take a total of 3 planes, and the entire trip was supposed to take around 16 hours. Of course, that 16 hour mark was purely in theory, as this number is almost unattainable to achieve.

In my case, I pretty much knew that the trip would take significantly longer than expected, because when I checked my baggage, I was told that my flight from Minneapolis to Detroit was delayed!

Seriously, how can a flight to Detroit be delayed? Northwest has two major hubs in the US; Minneapolis or Detroit (with Memphis being their third). Almost all flights on the airline are routed through either Minneapolis and Detroit, and they fly between the two destinations at minimum of once an hour. So, I was quite surprised to see that my flight was delayed for an hour, as the flight from Minneapolis to Detroit only takes 1 hour and 15 minutes!

Finally, the plane arrived for the flight, and we were able to board the plane. I was assigned an aisle seat, but ended up switching flip flopping with the person sitting next to the window so that she could be near her family members. No big deal, I thought, because I really don’t have much of a window/aisle preference. It turned out to be a bad decision.

I was placed in front of a 5 year old boy who was quite possibly the most annoying child in the entire world. Rather than talk, the kid screamed, and the relative level of excitement for the kid directly corresponded to the pitch of said screams. If he was not very excited, he’d let out a simple high pitched scream. When he was really excited, he screamed much louder. On a loudness scale, I’d probably say his scream was somewhere between those found in horror movies, and those of a velociraptor in Jurassic Park.

When the child wasn’t screaming, he was kicking the back of my seat. Not just little kicks either, but this kid was winding up! I thought about saying something to the boy (or even his mother, who somehow managed to not discipline the child at all), but I figured that the flight was only for a little over an hour, so why bother? With that said, I almost lost my composure with about 15 minutes left in the flight. This was when the kid wound up and kicked me right in the back. It didn’t feel very good, and I was about fed up with the child, so I turned around to say something. I turn my body, look back and see nothing; the kid was too small to even see in his seat! So, I gave up in my attempt to scold the boy, and mentally prepared myself for the next exchange that was about to happen.

When the plane touched down, it was 4:40 PM. Our connecting flight to Amsterdam was scheduled to leave at 4:45 PM. That meant we could still make the flight if we got of the plane quickly and ran to the next gate (the next gate was 21 gates away). This didn’t work very well, though, because we weren’t even able to get off the plane! For some reason they couldn’t figure out how to connect the plane to the walkway! Somehow, they decided that it would be fine if they only connected the plane to the walkway only half way, and then have us exit the plane by squeezing through the small opening that they tried to push us through. (It’s hard to describe how little the opening was that we had to walk through, but you can start by imagining the rounded door of an airplane, and how narrow that opening is. Now imagine cutting that opening in half (or maybe even 1/3); that’s the opening we had to squeeze through!

After squeezing out, Becky and I ran through the airport terminal to try and catch the next leg of our flight. We arrived at gate A28 and asked the guy at the counter if we were too late. He said “yes” and that they already re-routed us on another flight. He said that this time we’d be going through London, but then changed his mind and said we’d be going through Amsterdam once again, only on a 9 PM flight. He also gave us a $35 flight voucher and $10 each in food vouchers. Best yet, the delays and re-routing of our flights only set us back about 3-4 hours, so it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.

Since we had about 3 hours to kill, we decided to get some food and drinks in Detroit. We went to a place called the Internet cafe and paid $6 to use the Internet for 15 minutes and got several overpriced meals and drinks. After that we were finally able to leave Detroit, and seemingly never go back again! My final verdict on the Detroit flight; always fly direct when you can. Avoid layovers at all cost, no matter how much extra money it will cost you.

The next leg of the trip was our flight to Amsterdam. This went very smoothly, and was a great flight. The coolest thing about the flight was that each seat had individual TV screens with remotes! I was able to choose between about 30-40 movies to watch, which made for a great experience. International flights are fantastic!

The last leg was Amsterdam to Edinburgh. I was upgraded to business class for this flight as a result of the prior scheduling mishap in Detroit. Unfortunately, business class on this particular flight had no discernable advantage. The only real difference that I could see was that my chair was blue rather than pink. Everything else seemed about the same.

With that said, this concludes the flight portion of my trip. I’ll be back shortly to tell you about the first few days of my trip, and share some pictures of Scotland.

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