In the Fog

Having spent a hectic weekend in Cardiff, shopping and meeting up with a friend of my wife’s and having got together all-too-briefly with my mother, my sister, her family, and my father, we set out in our hire-car before 8AM on Monday morning, leaving ourselves plenty of time, so we thought, to board our 09:50 flight. A succession of navigational blunders on my part, however, soon saw us heading north-west out of the city, joining the M4 motorway, rather than south-west, in the direction of the airport.

This would have been readily correctable, had there not been an accident blocking the entire westbound carriageway near Bridgend, which, in turn, brought all traffic heading in that direction to a near-standstill. The minutes scratched by ever so slowly as we crept forward at an average speed of less than five miles per hour.

We finally made it to the airport five minutes after our sceduled departure time, whereupon I hurried into the terminal and announced to the lady at the KLM desk I think we’ve missed our flight. Which flight? came her reply. The 09:50 to Amsterdam, I responded, hasn’t it already left? No, she said, to my very great relief, it’s only just landed. It turned out that the fog we had seen clinging over the nearby fields had caused a delay just sufficient to allow us to make our flight, but not so severe that our onward connection to Copenhagen would be jeopardised.

The pictures above are of, or taken from, the St. David’s Hotel and Spa, in Cardiff Bay, where we had spent three very comfortable nights.

* * *

Upon our arrival at Copenhagen, our outrageous good fortune at having made it there at all was soon undercut by two fresh setbacks. Firstly, one of our two suitcases had failed to make the connection at Amsterdam. This is a type of mishap to which we have become all too well-accustomed, having experienced a half dozen such lost luggage incidents over the past few years. We were reassured that, in this case, the whereabouts of the errant case were known, and that it would be forwarded to us the next day.

Secondly, moments after we had joined the approach-road to the Öresundsbron, the bridge, that is, which connects Copenhagen with southwestern Sweden, we ran into a new traffic snarl-up, caused, we gathered, by a bad accident in the 6km tunnel which precedes the Danish end of the bridge proper. We sat and watched from a stationary line of cars as police-vans, fire-engines and tow-trucks sped purposefully back and forth. We were pleasantly surprised when traffic began to move again after less than half an hour.

As we traversed the bridge, we could see that the Swedish coast’s outline was softened by a diffuse mist. We had not travelled far beyond it before the mist thickened into a prodigious blanket of freezing fog, one which cut visibility almost to zero in some places, as all but the very nearest and clearest of external referents dissolved into the profound, all-engulfing murk. What was more remarkable than this fog’s density was its extent: it clad the entire southern Swedish coast, a fact we discovered to our cost as we journeyed eastward, with what would normally be a two-and-a-half hour drive taking an eye-straining, disorienting and exhausting four hours. I’ve seldom been more relieved to reach a destination than I was on pulling into the Mañana’s parking garage that evening.

Posted by misteraitch at February 26, 2003 12:52 PM | TrackBack