After a relaxing morning at my Warsaw hotel I decided, as much to shake myself out of lingering jet lag torpor, to head to the airport a bit early. Upon my arrival I do as I always do: I checked to see if that elusive bulkhead aisle forward seat had become free. Because being stuck precisely one row back was a human rights violation.
I then got in the queue to drop my bag, which wasn’t moving very quickly. No…make that not moving. At all. Several passengers were,in fact, sitting on scales blathering into mobiles. The check-in agents were all doing nothing. Eventually a wandering LOT agent trundled by: their entire airport management system had crashed.
No check-ins. No gate controls. no airport operations, in other words.
I did discern, however, some slight movement on the right periphery of my vision–aha! One queue was moving, albeit rather languidly doing so. It was, as it turns out, the online check-in podium (I was in the Star Alliance hawt poo line up, ’cause Air Canada see I’m hot poo), so I jumped into that queue.
The computer processed a person every 10 minutes. Thus in 40 minutes it was my turn. Ten minutes later I was at security: ten after that in the lounge. eventually enough passengers for the Vilnius flight trickled through and we boarded. And left an hour late.
Oh yeah: while we were waiting to board an air ambulance crew and some military personnel came out of the gate. 15 mites later they returned with a blonde fairly strapped onto the gurney shouting “nooooo!”. Very disturbing.
Vilnius has an adorable little airport, where the bags come out quickly, the tourist info folks are charming, warm, and multilingual, and the woman in the kiosk is too. Because of my large bag I needed 2 tickets into town. The citybus was waiting and jumped on just as the doors closed.
TheComfort Hotel was about 100m away. After twice trying to stiff me with a dumpy room, Mrs Egan’s withering glare appeared–at which point they transferred my booking to the much nicer Panorama Hotel hotel. A large studio suite in fact. With a jacuzzi bathtub.
My wanderings around Vilnius at night led to pizza and salad. And a sound night’s sleep