Jonas, a good friend from work is getting Married this weekend. In Hungary. He's marrying a Hungarian, so it makes a lot of sense.
160 people, from 19 different countries. An open bar from 7pm until 3am. It's going to be messy.
Jonas (aka Jan) has done an amazing jobs of organising all the people coming, informing them of where and when they have to be - and generally making it run rather smoothly.
However, it wasn't all smooth sailing for me and the wife.
Firstly, since all the recent security scares there's somewhat of a queue. I say that in the loosest terms. If you know Gatwick, this will be easier: we were queuing from around the train entrance all the way around past the check-in booths then in to four split aisles.
Once we were in our aisle we would zig-zag back and forth to finally go through security. It doesn't help that Gatwick only had two entrances to the security with thousands of people queuing.
We get to the departure lounge, thinking that since it took us two hours to get here (or there abouts) we would quickly grab some grub and make our way to the departure gate.
Gate open. Good, off to boots to grab a crappy sandwich. Two minutes later: gates closing.
We headed ran for the gate, and very strangely, it was like a ghost town. It was just me and the missus running down aisle after aisle always heading for gate 2.
We arrived. Told we were late. No-one about. The sent us through a corridor, which again we ran through - only to burst out on to the open runways! No plane to be seen.
Turns out the bus would come back. So, yes, we're that couple you curse as they casually wonder on to the plane after you've been sitting there for 30 minutes. We weren't late, but it was cutting it damn fine.
On arrival in Hungary we spotted a couple of friends, and whilst waiting for our baggage to arrive, I was reminiscing a story where by our bag wouldn't appear with the other luggage, and how we started to get very worried one time...and, it eventually turned up 45 minutes later.
So, maybe I jinxed the whole process a little. Low and behold: we had no bags. Neither did a few people from our flight. No bags is a real bummer. All our clothes (yes, next time we'll pack a spare pair of undies in our hand luggage) my laptop, our cameras - the insurance papers! The works.
We landed and arrived on Thursday and by Friday 10pm, after being told it'll be with us between 8-9pm we were getting pretty worried - especially with a wedding the next day and the prospect of having to buy all our stuff again!
To end our story with a jolt ending, we got back at around 1am, pretty pissed to find that our luggage had finally arrived.
The joy of clean socks and pants was overwhelming!