I’m back on the ship in Angola now. Needless to say, during my journey out here the global airlines’ vendetta on my travel arrangements continued un-abated ❗ Of the three flights I had to take, two were late and the third cancelled 👿 The first leg, from Aberdeen to London Heathrow was delayed for almost two hours. I was only supposed to have three hours in Heathrow and in that time I had to get from terminal 1 to terminal 3, pick up a replacement American Express card from the AmEx office and then get back to terminal 1 again. After a mad dash and panic, mission accomplished, I made it back to terminal 1 just in time to find that the Lisbon flight I had rushed to make was in fact delayed by an hour. We finally made it to Lisbon, only to find that we could check-in for the Luanda flight, but instead of leaving at 11:45pm it wouldn’t be leaving til 9am the fiollowing morning. We were all taken to a hotel for the night with instructions that we would be picked up again at 8am the following morning. We duly returned to the airport the next morning at the appointed time to find that the flight was in fact leaving at 11:45 am, 12 hours later than scheduled. (There was a rumor to the effect that the flight had in fact been cancelled because everyone wanted to watch the world cup semi-final, Portugal v France!) We made it to Luanda eventually and after three hours getting visa’s sorted and through immigration, we were met by the agent, who informed us that our minibus hadn’t arrived.. for the first time in four months of crew-changes it was’t waiting for the arriving crew.. I didn’t like to point out that it was probably my jinx following us again! hahaha An overnight stay in Luanda and then a flight (that was actually on time, probably because it was our own charter flight) to Soyo from where we were taken out to the ship. We’re into the last phase of our project here in Angola and all eyes are now on the calendar trying to guesstimate when we’ll be finished and when we will be sailing to the US. The ship’s next project will mobilise in Mobile, Alabama and that is where I’ll probably be getting off. That should make it a lot easiern for me to get up to Dazzle in Colorado. 😀
