Day 2: Less progress than planned

Alan here, as I write it is lunch time on Friday.

Around now, we had expected to be arriving in Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina, and the end of the flying part of the journey. But in fact we are only as far as Madrid... Not too impressive for 27 hours of travel, having only come from Glasgow. The trouble started yesterday, as we waited in Gatwick for the Madrid leg of the journey where we had a delay due to technical problems. We then took off late, but still with sufficient time to catch our onward connection to Buenos Aires (BA). However, not long after take off there was a huge amount of wind noise and the landing gear lowered. Chris, being a Captian, immediately knew there was something wrong. Not serious, he reassured, but not good either. The captain eventually announced that we were returning to Gatwick. Not too promising. Our connection was already tight. During landing we had the slightly disconcerting view of fire engines and ambulances, lights flashing, accompany us down the runway and along to the remote stance. After a good hour and a half of sitting on the tarmac, the captain announced that he was satisfied that the repair to the plane was now good and we could take off again. They also announced that we would not make the BA flight but would put us up in a hotel. Chris and I were as chilled as we could be about things, as there was nothing that we could really do, though it was with a large sigh of relief I heard the landing gear fully retract and click shut.

What we hadn't expected when we eventually arrived in Madrid, just after midnight, was the the rush for onward tickets and then the hotel bus. This was the seamier side of Saga, whose clients made up much of the folks heading to BA. I am sure there is some phrase that suggests folk become more gracefulwith age. Well let me tell you the Scottish Rugby team could not have generated a better scrummage, as the 60 OAPs pushed, shoved and with teeth bared tried to get their baggage onto a 20 seater coach. It didn't really improve when the next coach arrived. With Chris and I burdened with 9 bags and 120kg of luggage, and of course much better manners, we let the grey haired ruffians get their own way and ended up last on the third coach. Eventually, got to bed around 3am....

The fun is not over, the next flight Aerolinas Argentinas booked us on is Madrid to BA at 3:30pm which means an enforced stay in BA (assuming all goes well), where we are due to arrive at midnight, then are booked on the 6:20 am flight to Ushuaia... All in all the journey will be a whole day longer than necessary, with two unplanned overnight stops. On the plus side though, we have met a couple of interesting old codgers, both a very good vintage. One skis on wheels around the stately home of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's brother. The other worked as a dentist for a couple of years on the whaling stations of South Georgia back in the 1960s. And I now have upped my Spanish word count to 6. Plenty of smiling and muchos gracias resulted in all our excess bagage being accepted...