Daily Archives: January 17, 2004

The Chef Express drops me off home. Ah, normality.

When do we do it all again?

Channel, Dover, London, stack, clouds, whee, bumpy landing.
The plane taxis to a stand just outside Newmarket, I think.
We find our way to baggage reclaim and wait ages for it to wake
up and reclaim us. Walk, bus, car.

We’re early. Our flight hasn’t got a check-in desk yet. Being
British, we see a queue and join it. The screen above the desk
mentions Swissair, which is good, but also Alitalia and “telephone
check-in”, which is not so good. Never mind, Chef’s in charge.

At about 11:30 we reach the front of the queue and Chef asks
whether we can check in to our flight here. Yeah, no problem. Then the
usual airport routine: food, shops, queues, shops, security, plastic
seating, queues, impatience (“Could you just let us through?” says a
woman as Chris causes her a millisecond’s delay by callously taking
his assigned seat on board the aircraft), delay, safety film, here
here and here, taxi, engines, speed, height.

It’s snowing buckets again. We pack, tidy, wipe, rearrange.
Amazingly we’re picked up right on time. Our driver – English – whisks
us along snowy, winding roads down the mountainside. If this were
Britain there’d be bumper cars and ditches full of Ford Fiestas.

Once into the valley it’s a blur of villages (snowy/wet), Lake
Geneva (grey today), Montreux (probably nicer in Summer) and Lausanne
(a dump by the look of it) before we’re dropped at Geneva airport.