After that I quickly reorganized my stuff, took out the amp from the rucksack and went on to find the check-in desk. Sooo, 250-252, hmm, where can it be? Hey whats that funny queue of people? Is Justin Bieber having a concert at the airport or what? Unfortunately (fortunately?) not, and disbelieved, I joined the queue's tail. It was moving more slowly then ever, since SAS decided that the poor three desks are enough for hundreds of passangers travelling on several of their flights that were to take off in next few minutes. I used the time to somehow eat something, using feet to push my luggage and the amp and balancing guitar on a shoulder, while dipping a piece of bread in a cheese sauce. I could probably add juggling with chainsaws, but I'll save it for the next time I'm flying with SAS. When they finally called for passangers of our 13:15 flight to overtake everyone else in the queue, it was less then half an hour to the take off.
Although I was flying to Stockholm, the flight was to Copenhagen where I had 50 minutes to change the planes. However, already in Prague, I smelled delays and problems. Will they have enough time to reload my baggage to the second plane in Copenhagen? And will they not mess it up? At the time of writing this, I don't know yet.
When I finally checked in amongst the last passangers, I was told to run on the Fast track as the boarding has already started! So I did, run like hell. But the fact that the plane was due to take off in 10 minutes meant nothing to the security, where I was stopped for special control right upon entering the fast track. A sleepy guy slowly went over my guitar and amp, asking about its number of watts as if we were two street playing friends meeting over cup of coffee on a sunny afternoon. Finally free, I run for the normal Fast track security, which seemed to me actually slower then the normal one, but maybe that was just my feeling. Anyway, to make it more interesting, I beeped and holding with one hand my loose trousers (which would otherwise fall down as the belt was in the security check box), I was told to remove my shoes which were re-sent for the rontgen check.
Allright! Check them better twice! You never know what's in there (actually, few days ago, I found there about 10 super sharp pins. Heaven knows how they got there). I finally put them on and resumed my sprint to gate C7, where I was tooooo.... early.
What? Yes. The flight was delayed 15 minutes, meaning I could have taken it easy, if someone told me, of course.. ;) but I was not too happy about it either, as that could mean trouble getting the connecting flight in Copenhagen.
We eventually delayed a bit more then 15 minutes, but finally the engines started and we moved... like 20 meters. Then we stopped, waited 10 more minutes before the pilot shut down the engines again and told us there's a technical problem. But no worries, the problem was fixed - in a time that was just enough for me to miss the connecting flight in Copenhagen!
In the middle of this craze I was lucky to get another flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm, that was just half 50 minutes later then the original one. On the other hand, this meant exercised my sprinting abilities also in Copenhagen's (quite huge) airport - to the transfer desk and to a gate, to make it in time.
I did, and so far all is ok on the flight. We will see about the luggage. I hope to play today, so I kindly ask SAS: please, don't mess it up any more.
Ps: yeah! The luggage came! Let me simply somment it as: wow.
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