"Yes chicken, will do"
Mum and I signed off our conversation this morning. Her, Dad and Uncle Ste were in the RyanAir queue at Liverpool Airport waiting to check in for their flight to Pisa.
3 or 4 hours later, I was just about to have my lunchtime sarnie, and thought of the travellers. I logged on to t'interweb and found the Pisa airport site. I started looking at the arrivals but there looked to be something slightly wrong with the website. Out of the 19 flights due in this morning, only 5 had actually landed. All the others read 'CANCELLED'... including theirs!
That's odd, I thought. If their flight had been cancelled, I'm sure they'd have let us know by now. After all this was now after midday and the flight was due to have departed at 9:30.
I called Janey to see if they'd phoned or texted. "Why would they phone you?" she said. It was a good point, but I was sure they'd have phoned if something was wrong, so it must have been a problem with the airport's website. We both had a bit of trouble getting onto the "arrivals" page, which convinced us even further that the website was the problem, not the flight. Jane managed to get on to the RyanAir website which was still reporting 'on time' even though by this time, we were about 45 minutes after their scheduled landing time.
Atilla (who has already proved himself as travel agent extraordinaire) was on the case now. "Pisa Airport has been closed by violent thunderstorms" he said. I started getting flashbacks to being stranded in JFK when lightning storms closed the airport. "You're kidding?" I shouldn't have doubted his travel savvy. He directed me to a link on the RyanAir website which stated that the airport had been closed.
Eventually we managed to find a link to their flight which said it had been diverted to Bergamo!
Jane and I were in contact on GoogleChat when I phoned Dad on his mobile. "Ciao bella" he said. "Ciao Dad, are you in Bergamo?" "What? How do you know?" He was completely gobsmacked. "Jane and I have been following you on the web" "Ahhhh!" he said. (As though that's the answer to everything!)
While I was having the conversation about their whereabouts, Jane was looking up the trains from Milan to Forli. About 3 hours direct; a far shorter journey than the 3.5 to 4 hours it was going to have taken them on the bus, over the Appennines back to Pisa, plus another 3 hour train journey from Pisa to Forli!
Last I spoke to them was just after they were coming though Faenza, the last stop before Forli. About an hour later they texted to say they'd just set foot in the little house!
The travellers had arrived.
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