How many cancelled flights can you take???

CZ

Our New Zealand adventure started on February 3rd 2019. After an exhausting time packing, the time came when we were finally getting in the taxi, and everything was going surprisingly smoothly. At the airport, we checked in almost all of the junk that we had gathered whilst in England over the past year. Due to the airline‘s luggage restrictions, we had to say goodbye to one of our recent Christmas gifts that we had been given; a big fluffy blanket, at the baggage drop, and we were then ready to move through to security control. 

When we got there, we were pleasantly surprised to see that there was no queue. Yet despite this, it still took us half an hour to get through...

I can’t believe how long security control takes.. unpack the bag, take off your boots.. phone, keys, watch... and then pack it all again. It always takes so much longer than you’d expect - it’s like you blink and half an hour’s gone! We waited for about 25 minutes while Sabina sorted her life out, as if she didn’t expect to have to display the contents of her bag... it’s not like we’ve never been on a plane before - longest half hour of my life.

We finally got through to the departure hall that has over time, become all too familiar to us - we even have our favourite seats there, or so we thought... turns out they’ve been removed since our last visit, so we had to find a new place to eat this time, and that’s when it happened.. “ladies and gentlemen this is a passenger announcement, we regret to inform you that the EZY7365 Easyjet flight to Prague has been cancelled”

It was horrible. I’ve never been so stressed in my life, all I could do was sit down and cry... I just didn’t know what to do. To make it worse they then made us wait while they sorted all this mess out. 

We were escorted back round the airport to re-book our flights for the following day, and arrange free accommodation for the night. Meanwhile the snow that had caused chaos in Prague continued to fall.

Luckily the whole cancellation process was relatively straightforward and simple - the airline had taken all the stress out of it and put us up in a hotel literally round the corner, with a free buffet for dinner... it still didn’t make up for the lost day but we soon got over it and accepted that sometimes things happen.

The Holiday Inn wasn’t exactly the Ritz, but it had a nice bath and a bed much more comfortable than the one we were used to sleeping in, so it was one of the better nights-sleeps we got. Sabina had another bath in the morning, and then we returned to the airport later to continue what turned out to be a fairly quick and easy journey to Prague. Things seemed to be going well from this point, until an unexpected email from our ticket provider turned up in Sabina’s inbox.

Apparently the pilots of China Airlines had decided to strike due to working hours amongst other things, and this had directly impacted our flight.. by impacted, I mean our connecting flight from Brisbane to Auckland was cancelled, and just a few days before the scheduled departure.

Half of our flights have been cancelled already!!!! This is fate! Literally everything that could go wrong is going wrong... we’re never going to get to New Zealand....

It was true, it seemed the odds were stacked against us - in addition to the cancelled flights and being unable to obtain currency from any bureau, Sabina was still waiting on important medical results, and also missed a very important doctors appointment after her alarm didn’t go off.

I was starting to lose hope a little at this point, I kept saying that when the strike is over our flight will be back on and everything will be fine.. but in the back of my mind I was thinking about how much it would cost us if we had to sort out another last minute flight, and of course more importantly how that would affect our budget for the car. 

Anyway, the strike ended as expected just in time for China Airlines to re-schedule most of the flights... just not ours. It was now confirmed we wouldn’t be flying to New Zealand via Taipei, and after much fuss and email exchanges, dealing with differences in baggage allowances and an inconveniently timed email-server bug that put communications on hold for a day, we finally re-jigged our flights. We were NZ bound again!! Only this time we would be stopping off in... Korea. So it turns out we didn’t need those Taiwan dollars after all. 

It was a 10 hour flight to Incheon airport, Korea. That felt, of course much longer than that but at least we had plenty of gadgets to keep us entertained for the journey. Fitted to the back of every seat was a TV with a selection of films, games, and even links to the plane’s outward facing cameras. The food wasn’t bad and there was plenty of opportunity to sleep, although we were trying our best not to. A four hour wait in the departure lounge spent mostly either eating or looking for something to eat, and we were back on our next flight ... this time headed to Auckland ... 

Up next: Arriving in New Zealand

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More photos from our flights in our GALLERY