Thursday Morning Fun

After only four hours sleep we had fun negotiating Newcastle Airport on Thursday morning, although it reaqlly wasn't the chaos that the Newcastle Chronicle was reporting.

While standing in the check-in queue we were told by an announcement that with immediate effect no passengers were allowed to carry hand luggage. Ok for the 40minutes from Newcastle to Belfast thats not a huge problem and we quickly stuffed our things into the suitcase.

Then we went to Starbucks and got a mocha and a bottle of water and proceeded to the huge queue to get airside.

I managed to drink my entire drink in the queue it was so long!!!

While standing in the long queue people from further back started walking forwards saying loudly "did they just call the stansted flight?" so everyone for the stansted flight started following them with us standing thinking "we're at the front of the queue and we didn't hear them calling the stansted flight so how on earth did you hear them call the stansted flight" but I'll know or future use that thats a good way of queue jumping!

Got to security and was told that I had to leave behind my SEALED bottle of water that I had bought in the airport I even had a receipt!!! and the reason I wasn't allowed it - well the security man wasn't allowed to tell me!!!! Now remember it was about 6am and no-one had any clue about what was going on because we hadn't seen the news! I personally didn't think it was an acceptable answer but didn't think I'd win the arguement.

Then at the scanning machine thing the women wanted to send us out of security because of Andrew's car key, but after negotiation she let us take the battery out and it was no longer electrical.

However, I do think the airport security made a big oversight in forgetting that watches are electrical!!!! I didn't see them taking anyones watches. And I'm sure watches have been used in the past to detonate bombs, but they allowed the watches on board but not newspapers. I haven't figured out what threat newspapers pose.

But after my previous post about looking forward to New York I'm still looking forward to New York just not the journey because 5 or 6 hours with out a Ipod or a book will be awful.