Travel Warnings, Travel Tales

Saturday, 12 August 2023

I heard plenty of bear stories on my recent travels in Alaska and Montana – you’re chased up a tree by a bear, how do you know if it’s a black bear or a brown bear? If the bear climbs up the tree after you in order to kill you it’s a black bear. If the bear just stays at the bottom and shakes the tree until you fall out it’s a brown bear.

◄ Keep those bears away? Make sure you have your bear spray with you, but definitely not on your flight out of Montana, I encountered this bear spray warning at Bozeman Airport.

 

 

 

 

A few weeks later an opera singer friend turned up in London to stay with us. Her bags didn’t, Lufthansa had left them behind in Munich. Not only her two bags, everybody else on the flight arrived in London without their bags.

Missing baggage, Lufthansa ►

A couple of days later this gentleman turned up with her two bags – 46 hours 13 minutes after LH2474 landed at Heathrow after a 1 hour 29 minute flight from Munich. The bags clearly sat at Munich for 24+ hours before Lufthansa managed to get them on to LH2480 and then it took 15 hours from when LH2480 landed to get them from Heathrow to my place. The delivery driver had a station wagon stuffed full of bags to be delivered, he said they had 8,800 bags to be delivered from Luton alone. Plus the Heathrow, Stanstead, Gatwick bags …

▲ Not far from the the Savoy Hotel off the Strand in central London I discovered a neat, tidy and surprisingly well hidden little homeless encampment including this patriotically union-jacked tent with a sign which seems to indicate that it’s related to a rather larger version of Buckingham Palace a 1.1 mile walk away.

◄ At the Eurostar check in at Gare du Nord station in Paris I encountered an even more serious warning than the Montana bear spray sign – try to bring war relics, artillery, ammunition or weapons on board and the whole train could be cancelled