Madrid airport was a sea of queues. Queues for the check in, queues for immigration, queues for security. And then we had to travel halfway across Spain to find the terminal, just in time to get on the flight. No time even for last minute souvenir shopping (we'd forgotten to do this in Madrid as we were to damn drunk all day). El crashed out immediately and Kieran read a book. V e r y s l o w l y.
After an hour or so, El perked up a bit and gazed into space for a bit. "That's funny" she thought, as a man 2 rows ahead got up to let someone else go to the loo, "That man looks a bit like my dad". When you go away for a year you learn to expect this - We've "seen" our friends in every country around the world - and so she dismissed the thought as silly. Although, he was tall, going bald, a bit grey, with glasses....NAH.
After feeling very funny for about 10 minutes she whispered to Kieran her thoughts. NAH, he said. They both had a good look from the back and decided he'd never buy a flight to Madrid and back just to see them on the plane, that was plain stupid, and expensive. And then the man leaned to one side and El saw that he was wearing a bum bag. Her heart started racing and it wasn't just the hangover. Surely no two people in Western Europe following Francis's description were still wearing bum bags???
As we spoke, the drinks trolley neared and so we thought we'd have a drink to calm our nerves. We were just an hour away from seeing Francis for real it was just our eyes playing tricks. The stewardess then leaned to El silently with a bottle of champagne. Being slightly hungover at this point, El just started at it blankly as if she wasn't quiet sure what it was. I mean, she knew what it was just not why she was passing it to El - after last night champagne was really the last thing she wanted.
Still, the stewardess persevered and passed El a small note while handing a bottle to Kieran.
It actually was him!!!!!!!!!
In fact, he'd been on an important climate conference in Valencia and had the flight booked by work months before, and when he'd looked closer at the ticket, he realized the flight was via Madrid on the same day we flew, and it was in fact, totally and utterly and completely randomly THE SAME FLIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Does realizing in advance stop it being random? I think not, and anyway he kept it a secret from us so that it would be a total surprise for us, but he could plan the whole champagne thing! Brilliant. I mean, we've had very few coincidences on our trip (apart from meeting someone at Rio airport called Eleanor and from Reading, that was quite spooky) and this just about tops them all.
We were speechless as we glugged our bubbly, and waited endless long minutes for the trolley dolleys to get out of the way, and so we could have a hug and a kiss and a surprise and silly, disbelieving laughter in the middle of the aisle at 30,000 feet, somewhere over the Pyrennees. It's a crazy world out there.
Nah. Can't be....
Er, hang on a minute....
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Daddy!!!!!!!
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