Airport madness

This was the view from the back of the ferry as left Dublin Port en route to North Wales:

Leaving Dublin, 2022, on the fast ferry to Holyhead, North Wales.  M6/28mm with yellow filter on HP5+.  HC-110 on Ilford MG Classic paper.  The sky got a little burn in, as you can probably tell. 

The faster of the two Irish Ferries ships takes just over 2 hours from Dublin to Holyhead and it really does motor on quite swiftly.  Not that there is much to do on board except 'relax'.  Well there are bars and places to eat (I would hesitate to call them restaurants) but we just sat down and closed our eyes for the duration.  One of the 'meal deals' was offering a pizza and a pint for 20 Euros - not much of a deal to my eyes.

We did a few stops en route to Oxford - in fact, we stayed the night in North Wales as we were dropping Missy off in Betws-y-coed the following morning, for her week's Field Trip as part of her course.  They had a grand time, apparently - trapping, identifying and releasing moths and doing various surveys of the plants that inhabit Snowdonia National Park.  It's a beautiful area, if a little damp at times. Coming home for her a couple of days ago was a little challenging, though, on account of the chaos that most UK airports seem to be in these days.  I don't understand why the Uni decided that the Field Trip would be best done the week of (a) half term, when all the school students were on holiday and (b) the Queen's Jubilee celebrations, when the rest of the country was on holiday as well.  It was, as you can imagine, a perfect storm.  Her flight back to Belfast from Birmingham was cancelled but fair play to Easyjet they were quick to organise a hotel for the night and a hot meal, so I can't fault them there.  She was re-booked on an early flight the following morning and this is where it all fell apart.  She got a little lost from the hotel to the airport and arrived, well, in decent time under normal circumstances but in not enough time this particular week.  The place was chaos and Easyjet hadn't sorted out her check-in/boarding pass in advance, which meant joining a massive queue to get checked in followed by another massive queue to go through security...all at 7am.  So she missed her flight and as a result got very upset.  At this point (she told us later) she just wanted to curl up in a corner, call mummy and say 'Come get me'.  Unfortunately that wasn't possible but Father dearest was able to re-book her on the next available flight (different carrier, late afternoon) and eventually, having spent all day sitting in the airport she made it home.  Easyjet went from hero to zero overnight - they could have organised it better.  When they re-booked her on the morning flight they should have offered online check-in, as they normally do - or even provided a fast-track solution for people who have had their flights cancelled and re-booked.  I'm sure Missy wasn't the only one to miss that flight.  

The madness is partly due to the fact that the airline companies laid off thousands of people during the early part of Covid, when almost no-one was able to fly.  Now that things have opened up again, they don't have the staff and can't get them recruited and passed security clearance quickly enough.  As a result, hundreds of flights are being cancelled.  I read that the chaos is likely to continue for some time - maybe even into next year.  Not good news for anyone hoping to get away.  Well, getting away might be OK - it's the getting back which can be the problem.  I'm staying put for now.