Brussels Airport - again!

A year later and I'm back here again. For slightly longer than expected this time though.

All was running smoothly. Lesley and I had seats together from Birmingham to Brussels and were patiently awaiting boarding for our onward flight to Dakar when we heard the dreaded announcement (actually only Lesley heard it as I was in the toilets). Our flight had been cancelled!

Apparently they'd discovered problems with the landing gear on the plane that was to carry us and it was not safe to fly.

Passengers for Dakar and Monrovia were split up and taken away for further information, in three languages of course, English being the final with the smallest audience (us and one American man).

We were told that they had found a solution to take us all on to Dakar. We would be flying on to Lisbon and then from there on to Dakar with TAP. The connecting flight is at 1700, we received this information at 1000.

Boarding passes were taken in and meal vouchers were handed out with the instructions to meet again at 1300 so we trundled off to find something to amuse ourselves for two hours before eating lunch.

At 1300 we were given new boarding cards for our onward flights and told to proceed to terminal A where we could pick up another snack voucher at the Brussels Airlines desk.

As the day has gone on we've been gradually descending into some kind of state just above sleepwalking. I tried to wake Lesley up by challenging her to a sudoku race using a puzzle on the back of a freebie magazine but once I'd won she seemed to lose any wits she had gained by the exercise and quickly started to flag again.

Having just awoken from a short semi-snooze we're about to locate our new gate number where we'll be hopefully boarding in half an hour or so.

We should arrive in Dakar at 0100 tonight all being well. It's a shame not to arrive at school in the daylight but the upside is we no longer need to worry about fitting both our luggage into a taxi as Bob is coming in with the minibus to pick up the De Souzas (new staff) who will be on our TAP flight.

Should really move now, Lesley's looking bored/impatient.