Current Mood: Alarmed

Am I suffering the first symptoms of senile dementia?!

Well, I don’t know where to start… this has been one hell of a strange day. Alarm goes off at 6, we get ready and pack last bits and pieces before going down for breakfast, and finally leave the hotel with plenty of time to spare at around 8.45 am. At 9.35, not being able to find our flight on the departure screen yet (waaaay too early! ), we check with the information desk and are told that we just missed it.  – We missed our bloody flight!!! They did contact the cabin crew, and it transpired that they would have taken us on if we’d been without luggage…

I can’t remember how often I looked at the printout of our itinerary from the Air Malta website. There are three flights on it: 28th December Malta – Sofia; 8th January Istanbul – Sofia and 8th January Sofia – Malta. Somehow it’s been slipping my mind that the Sofia – Istanbul flight on 2nd January was a separate one, with Turkish Airlines. So the genius that I am, had been looking at the third flight details on the Air Malta sheet (Sofia – Malta) when organising our departure from the hotel. I bet there isn’t a bigger idiot on this planet as of this morning. Perhaps I should apply for an entry in the Guinness Book…

The first thing I did when the truth sank in: I broke out in tears. I just couldn’t believe it; I felt as if I was losing my marbles! It’s so not me, doing such a stupid thing – but do it I did… 50 years minus a couple of months, and I managed for the first time to miss a flight. Whatever next?!

Now it’s almost 12 hours later; we’ve calmed down, although it still has a sort of surreal feel to it. There’s no flight to Malta until Monday; thankfully we don’t have to purchase new tickets, but “just” pay 45 euro each to change the existing ones. We simply took a taxi back to the hotel that we had just left (and thank you to Ciler – the PR Manager there – for sorting it out so quickly!! :) ), and here we are again… in another lovely Bosphorus view room, and at staff rate, too.

A friend of mine had commented on facebook that she believed everything happened for a reason; funnily enough, that was exactly what I said to hubby when we went out for a walk after unpacking… You see, today was the first sunny day since we arrived in Istanbul!

Let’s see how things keep going… I just opened the balcony door for some fresh air – and it’s raining again!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Sabine's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.