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Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Time Flies

When I was in HK - particularly in the last 2/3 years we were living there - I tended to do a farr amount of travel for work - towards the end around once or twice a month on average. Whilst the novelty of this soon wore off, one of the great advantages was that my packing skills became sufficiently honed to the extent that I could get pretty much all I needed for a 3 day trip into a carry on bag. This included swimming trunks in case the hotel had a pool (but not a towel), casual clothes and enough work clothes for three days of meetings. It has to be said that the bag (one of Samsonite's finest) occasionally groaned at the seams and I was generally forced to take full advantage of the dispensation that allowed a briefcase/laptop bag as well as a carry on bag into the cabin.

In practice this also meant that I could indulge my penchant for arriving "just in time" for my various flights and meetings as I avoided the need to queue to deposit luggage for the hold (which generally requires an earlier arrival time at the airport and obviously delays departure at the other end).

Here in the desert the airport is if anything even easier to get to than in HK (where my record was to make a flight while leaving our office in Wanchai 75 minutes before the flight time - which is definitely cutting things fine). The airport here is less predictable but since investing in an E- Gate card (which bypasses the passport control queue for non-emiraties), I can generally budget on leaving the office 90 minutes before departure as a bare minimum.

Obviously if the traffic is bad this can considerably increase the stress levels of the trip. However, this is nothing compared to the stress I used to suffer when travelling with a colleague in the Far East who was notorious for insisting, regardless of the time we arrived at the airport or how proximate the flight departure was, in visiting the business lounge to take advantage of the facilities.

On occasions I was forced to leave him to it - and as usual he would literally be the last person on board as the doors closed - he seemed to take a perverse pride in this all he did tell me of the (admittedly surprisingly few) occasions when he in fact missed the flight as they wouldn't let him past the boarding gate!

For today's journey, however, I will need to leave myself a bit of time given the 2 huge bags (as well as carry on luggage) that I am transporting back to England.

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