Oh yes, life can be hard sometimes. After my two last days of work in the big apple, the time had come to fly back to Brussels. One working day there kept me away from the start of our holidays. But it turned out to be some of the more stressed moments we encountered…

Murphy’s law of bad weather

In the night before we had scheduled to depart from New York, a severe thunderstorm woke us up in the early morning. We didn’t payed attention to it any more, till our driver picked us up at the hotel to head to JFK. Even if we had like three and a half hour before the plane would leave, he started to give us excuses while it could be that he would not make it to the airport in time. To give his words a little more prove, he turned on the radio, were we heard indeed that New York’s traffic was not just jammed but that the city was (as the New York Times said it) “brought to its knees“. The driver managed to get us out of the city in under 45 minutes, and by using small roads in Queens where I never was before, we made it to the airport in less than one and a half hour. Most people we met at the airport had travelled over two hours and a half from Manhattan to JFK.

Mispacking luggage

(Koen’s misreading)

So, after we landed (later than expected) in Brussels, I rearranged my schedule to accommodate as much meetings as possible, without jeopardising the chances of (re-)packing luggage to get ready for Madeira. So when it all (hmm … read on) was packed, I looked at those tickets. 20 kilo seemed to be the luggage limit… Great, but that was a little (!) over the weight of my case at that time. So a repackaging effort started, while I left a lot of the more heavy stuff aside, to add it later. This heavy stuff, including my books, is still at home. I’ll have to take a few days off when I get back, so I can read all those books I hoped to get trough here…

The stories at Zaventem airport will be subject of the blog tomorrow or so. Stay tuned for another new low in services-industry performance!

But, right now we are enjoying a stay at this great island in the middle of the ocean. I’ll post pictures on the website and I’ll blog some more stories in the next days. In the meanwhile, we’ll be swimming in the ocean, picking up golf again after months of inactivity, and enjoying the mild climate here: all what’s needed to recuperate from the 36 stressfull hours of travel