dag 1218: I wish I was here

Just back from my latest trip to the land of the midnight crayfish so here is the low-down.

You may remember that last year, and also each of the previous years, I had problems that almost, but not quite, caused me to miss the flight so this year I though I would take precautions. Rather than risk getting stuck in traffic I thought it would be a good idea to spend the night before the trip in one of those hotels that provide parking into the cost of your room. That way it wouldn't cost much more than the parking at the airport and we would be able to get to the airport earlier than usual without having to get up quite so early as usual. What a plan - you get benefits from both ends and it doesn't even cost too much. How could anything to wrong?


I had never used one of these stay and park hotels before so I didn't really know how they worked so I did a bit of investigative journalism first. It seems there are a number of different option depending on the hotel chosen. Some let you park on their site while you are away, while others arrange for you to park at the airport, but the cost is met by the hotel. Some take your car off you when you check in to the hotel and you don't see it again until your return. This last one wasn't any good for me as I wanted to be able to leave our dirty closes from the day we checked in in the car so we didn't need to take them to Sweden in our luggage.

I managed to find a website that searched all the hotels around Manchester airport so I entered the date of the night we wanted to stay and it came back with a choice of 3 hotels. One of them was 10 miles from the airport and didn't look very nice in the picture, another one was not as far away and was called a "county house" hotel and had a nice looking photo of the exterior. The final one didn't have a picture, but sounded ok and was in the same hotel group as the country house one. After thinking about it for a bit and discussion it with other interested parties the general consensus was that the country house one sounded the best bet. There was a coach that would take us to the airport and bring us back and I was sure the parking would be nice and secure and away from dodgy areas if it was in the grounds of a country house hotel.

Unfortunately by the time we tried to book the country house hotel was booked up so we looked a bit more into their sister hotel, which was actually only 3 miles from the airport so a much closer location. The website for this hotel didn't have a picture of the hotel exterior, but it had some interior shots and it looked very nice inside. There was no mention of how frequent the coach journeys were, but as the hotel was so close to the airport it looked like the journey wouldn't be much more that around 10 minutes so we should be able to get up at a decent hour and get to the airport with plenty of time to check in and get some breakfast before boarding the flight. So we booked the room and everything was ready to go.

If you read last years report you will know that a few days before the flight out the booking I had made disappeared off the website and when we got to the check in desk we found we didn't actually have a booking. I didn't want this to happen again so I checked the website each day leading up to our day of departure and the booking showed up each time so it looked like that was all ok, so what could go wrong?

The only other thing I could think of would be that I would forget to take something important. There weren't many things I needed to remember and the full list was:
Swedish money - I had some left over from before and had managed to accumulate more at Christmas and my birthday.
Passports - Obviously we wouldn't get very far without these.
Directions to the airport hotel - just to be sure as I had no idea where it was.
Flight booking reference number - just in case the booking ended up getting lost at the very last minute.
Vouchers - SAS had sent us some vouchers for free food and drinks on the plane (very nice of them).
Bulbs - we needed to buy some replacement light bulbs for a light we had bought in Sweden.
Camera charger - last year I forgot this so couldn't take as many photos as I wanted to.
Disk case - containing a selection of DVDs to watch in the hotel room.

We had bought the light about 6 years ago. It was a flat board with about 20 tiny bulbs in it that hangs on the wall and , I may add, looks really rather nice and quite unusual. It came with a load of spare bulbs, but as I hadn't thought to remove the ones that were already fitted before packing it in the suitcase, they had all been squashed and destroyed during the flight home. I had, therefore, had to fit almost all the spare bulbs the first time we used it. So the following year on our trip to Stockholm I had needed to buy some more spare bulbs from the shop were we bought it. They only had about 10 spare bulbs as they had stopped selling that particular light so I just bought all the ones they had. Since then the bulbs had gradually failed and been replaced. Each year I had tried to find more, but never managed it. We even tried to get a local electrical company to see if they could get hold of them, but they failed to locate them anywhere. About a month before this trip we had to use our final spare bulb - if any failed now we wouldn't be able to replace them. About 2 weeks before the trip another bulb failed and a week before a second bulb failed. I still had the packet from the spare bulbs so I needed to make sure I took it along with one of the dud bulbs to make sure we could get some more spare ones. I kept reminding myself each night when I looked at the light that I need to get the bulb packet and a spare bulb and pack them carefully and take them with me.

As we got nearer the trip I began to fell a little uneasy. I couldn't really put my finger on what was causing this unease, but I remember mentioning it in an email to the proprietor of Cloudhands at some point.

The day of departure finally arrived. I was to travel to work in Leeds by train and would be picked up after work so I could drive straight to the hotel. We needed to get there as quickly as possible so the kids, especially the youngest, didn't have to wait too late for their dinner.

About half an hour before I was due to be collected I call a call to say that my wife thought she had forgotten to pack the DVDs. It wasn't the end of the world, but I nipped out of the office to see if I could find anything decent and cheap in Virgin. I managed to get a copy of series 1 of New Tricks for a reasonable price, which was good as we had only started watching this program in its second series and had been really enjoying series 3. So far all was OK.

I got picked up around an hour later than originally planned so I needed to put my foot down. The journey was pretty fast and smooth and we soon found the hotel quite easily.

When it came into site I realised why there was no photo of it on the website - it looked like some ageing concrete clad tower block in much need of knocking down. As we unloaded the car I noticed a group of about 6 hoodies on bikes watching us and didn't have a very good feeling about the place at all. Still there was nothing much we could do about it so we want inside to check in. There was 1 person at the desk and a queue of people waiting to check in. I looked around the lobby and into the bar area and restaurant and noticed that everything looked old and in need of replacement. Eventually we got checked in and I was asked to move my car up a ramp into their car park once we had got our stuff sorted out in the room. We went up in the lift and found our room. The photos of the rooms on their website looked clean, bright and newly decorated. Our room looked dirty, dark and very much in need of a complete redecoration including new carpets and new furniture. The room was also unbearably hot. The double bed looked about 2 inches wider than a single bed and the kids bunk bed looked home made.

I went down to move the car and also find out about the frequency of transfer couches. There was sill a queue at reception so I went to move the car first. I drove up the ramp and looked for a space. I found one and noticed that there were signs all over the place stating that this is not a security car park and people should not leave anything inside their cars. This is something that wasn't mentioned on their website (or at least if it was I hadn't spotted it).

Back in the hotel I saw more signs warning people not to leave anything in their cars and was given a coach schedule. It seemed that the coaches only leave once each hour and take 45 minute to get to the airport. This seemed a bit strange when the airport was only 3 miles sway, but then I realised that the coach goes to the airport via the country house hotel that belongs to this chain, which happens to be further away than our hotel.

By this time I was wishing we had managed to get a room at the country house hotel. I noticed a big sign advertising the hotel as a suitable venue for wedding receptions and I wondered who would ever consider having a wedding reception here.

Looking at the coach timetable I realised that we would have to get up at 06:00 the following morning in order to be ready to catch the coach that would get us to the airport at around 08:15. We may as well have stayed at home and driven in the following morning as we were still going to have to get up really early and we would have had to sleep in this dump.

The night was hot and hardly anyone got much sleep and we were all pretty much shattered when we finally got ready the next morning.

There were quite a few other groups of people waiting for the same coach as us so it took quite a while to load it up, and then we set off for the country house hotel. The coach turned down the drive and I noticed that there were cars parked on every available bit of verge and grassy area. One of the first cars I noticed had its front side window smashed. I was beginning to feel a bit relieved that we hadn't managed to get a room in this hotel. There were even more people waiting for the coach here than at our hotel so it was some time before we set off for the airport and the coach was now full. We then had to wait for the drop offs at each of the terminals and, of course, it stopped at our terminal last. I found a trolley, piled all our cases on and headed of for the SAS check in desk. The airport seemed crowded and when we got to the familiar location of the SAS check in desks we found that they were no longer SAS, but some budget airline. I pushed the trolley into the main check in desk area with a growing fear that maybe SAS had changed terminals since our last trip, but fortunately I found their desks round the corner. They didn't seem to have as many as they used to have. I wondered if this was due to the increasing market share of the budget airlines encroaching into the traditional airlines market.

There was quite a queue at the desks but fortunately my SAS Eurobonus gold status had been extended for an extra year so we managed to get checked in nice and quickly with none of the problems we had last year.

We then headed down to the passport control where we saw lots of people chucking bottles of water into big plastic bins. We had brought 3 large bottles for the kids and so these went on the bins with everyone else's. We were told we could buy more once we got through passport control, which no doubt would cost at least double what we had paid for these ones - what a waste of money.

Once we got to the x-ray machines the jar of baby food we had brought with us was packed so we had to open that and eat some, presumably to prove it wasn't poisoned. They then told us that the bottle of perfume in the bag would have to be thrown out. This was almost full and had cost about £50. It was quite obvious it was perfume as you could spray it and smell it, but for some reason it was not allowed on board so in the bin it went. I had forgotten about these newly introduced security measures that were introduced just before we went to Spain last year. Personally I fail to see what good these new restrictions do. We could quite easily have drunk from each water bottle to prove it was Ok and spraying the perfume onto our skin and allowing the guard to smell it quite easily proves what it's contents are.

Once all this was over at last it was our chance to get some breakfast, or at least that was the plan. All of the tables were occupied and there was a large number of people balancing trays loaded with breakfast walking round hoping they could catch somebody about to leave and grab their table. We queued up for ages bought some over priced breakfasts containing under cooked bacon and joined the seat searchers. We managed to find one and ate our now cold breakfasts. We had also brought some replacement bottles of water, but in the rush to try and get finished quickly to enable somebody else to have our table we managed to leave them only realising once we had boarded the plane.

So we hadn't had the same troubles as last year, but we still boarded the flight feeling pretty stressed, although as before once we got up in the air the stress began to go. Freddy slept for the whole flight and the other 2 kids kept themselves quiet and busy so we could have a glass of champagne and make a start on reading Prime Time by Liza Marklund.

As we touched down in Arlanda Airport I was feeling pretty contented. I would be spending the next 6 days in Sweden. I knew the time would fly by but just now at that time it was the beginning so I had it all to look forward to.

A couple of Swedish Birds