Elizabethian Essays: Back to England

After our 7 hr., overnight flight from Toronto - Manchester, we all had gotten out of our seats with our hand carries in tow, and were waiting in the aisles for the door to open. Instead, we were told to go back to our seats and wait - a suspicious package had been found at the airport and 2 of the 3 terminals had been closed.

Manchester Airport

Walking to Train Station instead of the airport.

Eventually we were allowed off the airplane, but immediately after we cleared immigration and collected our luggage, we were ushered outside and directed to walk to the train station - brr - that cold walk in the early morning did a great job of waking us up.

Crowd waiting in the Train Station for the Airport to Re-open.

The train station was overloaded with people waiting to get into the airport. I kept checking on line to see the end result and found out a few days later that a questionable bag, which had passed through the scanner, turned out to contain a bottle of contact lens solution tightly packaged with parts of a mobile phone. I wonder if this had anything to do with the date being April 1st?

I guess it is obvious why we had to transfer to a bus.

Within an hour we were on the train, which usually takes 3 hours to get us across the country. There had been a landslide though while we were gone which damaged and uplifted huge sections of the train track. So after an hour on the train, we were transferred to a bus for an hour or so, and then finished the journey by train, which added 1 1/2 to the trip.

It was good to see our neighbour waiting for us at the end of the line to take us on the last leg of our journey - just 1/2 hr. to home.

They are great neighbours - the kind everyone would like to have - had turned up the heat in our house the day before - had bread, milk and fruit waiting for us for the next day's breakfast and invited us over for supper that night!!