16/9/84

Yeah, we long gone. Germany now & no longer hot. Keeping warm is the problem. But it's nice to be here. Getting here was half the “fun”

Departed St Vincent on Thursday morning (Sept 13th) Paul picked us up and we arrived Arnos Vale with plenty of time to spare. Actually the Air Martinique plane was about 45 minutes late. So no sweat actually,our plane left at 7:30 p.m. and we arrived about 10:50 a.m. Except by the time we cleared Immigration and Customs, etc it was past 11:00 so no foreign exchange and no taxi into town, no food either until 3:00 p.m. when the Cambio opened. No lockers either so we either took our bags with, or we stayed at the airport. We elected to do the latter. It was a rainy hazy day anyway. Not much for seeing FDF in.

Finally caught lunch at 3:30 and then ambled over to Nouvelle Frontier desk at 4:30. Behind about 125 people who had shown up around 3:00 p.m. (must have flown them before). Worked our way slowly to the desk and fortunately there was someone who spoke English well enough to sort out our ticket problems. Finally managed to figure out what gate to go to and squeezed ourselves aboard (6 across, by I don't know how many rows). We did get some food and drink on the flight but very little sleep. Only one of our seats reclined, Deb and I alternated sleeping on each other and our heads resting on the fold down trays. After about 15 minutes sleep the sun started to come up (about 3:00 a.m. according to my internal clock). Soon after, we arrived at the Brussels airport. 

Then we caught the train into Brussels. No problem. Actually the easiest leg of the entire journey. We got out at the central station, checked our bags and went out and walked around in a cold rain for a while. To most people the weather would have been miserable, to me it was wonderful. I got pretty frustrated after a while. I wanted to see Brussels, but I didn't want to get soaked. I also wanted to walk to pick up the car, but didn't want to get soaked.

We finally called a cab and caught it to the VW dealership and picked up the car. From there we wandered into Leuven to find Margaret's folks which we managed to do without much trouble.