Here we are into June already. 20 days to the longest of the year.
We arrived home as scheduled on Thursday, May 30th at 1030 in the evening, after a long day of travel from Budapest. Our flight out of Budapest was about an hour late due to heavy air traffic volume, and that meant that our time in Amsterdam would be well under an hour. During that flight, the crew announced that passengers on board, connecting to five other KLM flights would be missing their flights and action was underway at Amsterdam to make new connections for them. Our flight was not mentioned, but they named flights to Atlanta, Seattle ,Tokyo as some other locations that were affected. When we got to the terminal, we had about 25 minutes to make our flight to Montreal!. We arrived at gate A6, and had to get to gate E19...about half a kilometer across the Amsterdam Terminal Building.
Enroute to that gate, we had to clear Passport control...about 200 people ahead of us. When we entered Amsterdam from Canada, I had noticed the process for quick clearance, so we did that, and were placed at a place where we were the first in line to get to the Passport officer. That took about one minute. As we approached gate E19, we heard our names being called for the flight, with the final words...the gate is now closing!. I waved to the staff, showed her our Boarding Pass, and we were taken to the aircraft door...where we were greeted by a smiling Captain, Co-pilot and all cabin crew. They were surprised that we had made the connection. We took our seats, were glared at by some other passengers, and we settled in. The Captain then came on the speaker and announced...Sorry Ladies and Gentlemen, but Air Traffic Control have told us we cannot start engines for 35 minutes due to traffic. He explained that all day, two runways were used for departures, one for landing. Since in was now late afternoon, they were now using one runway for departures, and two for landing, due to heavy inbound flights.
This was one of my best vacations, and we did a lot of interesting things...among them A luncheon cruise on the Danube River and a visit to the Budapest zoo, which is located in a very nice forested area. Time did not allow for a visit to the Botanical Gardens.
Several times, we had lunch or just a coffee at a cafe beside the Danube, one of the great rivers of Europe, and very heavily traveled by River Cruise ships. The accident there on May 29 was the first where people were injured in 41 years.
