The Honeymoon

We were flat broke after our wedding, and there was no money for fabulous trips to the Grand Canyon or Australia for the honeymoon.

We booked two weeks in Greece with Budget Travel and were damn glad of it.

We’d been together for eleven years at this stage, so I’m not even going to pretend that the honeymoon was full of surprises.  That would be dishonest and downright stupid.  And nobody would believe it.

No, if memory serves, it was a normal sun holiday.  I know I got drunk quite a few times, His Nibs had given up drink for good already.   When he was about thirty he woke up one morning with a roaring hangover and said he was giving up drinking for good and actually did it! This is not an urban legend.  It’s absolutely true.  I was so impressed I married him.

No, sadly our honeymoon isn’t memorable for the high jinx and chandelier swinging it might have, but didn’t, involve. 

Our honeymoon is memorable because of the trip home.

His Nibs and I don’t really have much luck in airports or with air travel in general.  I mean in an everyday way, not in the “strangers put heroin in my luggage and I got ten years in the Bangkok Hilton” kind of way.  If there is ever going to be a problem or delay on a flight, it’s always on our flight. 

We were only in the air for about forty five minutes when this plane lost pressure and dropped from 37,000 feet to 12,000 feet. 

There was a very sudden sensation like going downhill on a rollercoaster, and the oxygen masks dropped out of the ceiling.  Obviously, everybody got a bit of a fright.  I am not able to stay awake in planes, so I was very happily dozing when all this drama started. 

We were absolutely not helped by the young and inexperienced-looking steward, and I am not joking about this, who ran down the aisle of the plane waving his hands and squealing

“Jesus Christ, oh Christ almighty!!” which perhaps unsurprisingly, caused all out panic. 

They always make it sound, in the safety demonstration, as if you just pop the mask over your mouth and carry on.  This is not what happens, or at least it didn’t happen on the plane we were in.  The mask over my seat dropped just a couple of inches.

Still fairly dozy, I looked at His Nibs, waiting for an explanation.  He was kind enough to fill me in with the words

“We’re in big trouble here, put that mask on you, and brace yourself”,

before he started pulling on his mask.  Bewildered, I grabbed my mask, which didn’t move.  I gave it another tug, no go.  I ended up taking off my seatbelt, (strictly forbidden in the circumstances), standing up and actually swinging out of the mask in my attempt to bring it down to face level.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I couldn’t do it. 

Eventually His Nibs noticed.  This was our honeymoon, these days I could be doing the hula hula in a grass skirt (God forbid) and he wouldn’t notice  Anyway, he fixed the mask for me.  It was very soon after this that I realised that the captain was giving us too much information.

In an ideal situation, I think the captain would come on the speaker and announce that we had lost pressure, but not to worry, he knew what he was doing, and he’d tell us anything we needed to know about.  This would be done in a soothing and professional sounding voice.

No such luck.  He decided that the best course of action would be to tell us everything that happened, as it happened.  So we spent the next ninety minutes being given nuggets of information like

“We were going to do an emergency landing in Italy but I don’t think we can keep the plane up over the mountains.  Rather than risk it, we’re going to go down around the boot of Italy and try to do an emergency landing in Spain instead”. 

This information was no help to us. 

There’s always one in every group, and somebody started a decade of the Rosary.  I just sat there, wondering what he meant by “trying” to do an emergency landing, with the Hail Mary ringing in my ears. 

We were a lot less hysterical than I would have expected.  As a matter of fact we spent a few happyish minutes talking about how if you have to go, at least a plane crash is more interesting and glamorous than being run over by a moped. 

Although we could see land outside the window for the duration of the flight to Spain, we stayed in the air.  Even the steward seemed to calm down a bit.  Possibly because his colleague, a far more professional person in my opinion, was holding his hand and telling him not to worry, that the captain knew what he was doing and to have faith.

The emergency landing was a success, and after a few hours in an abandoned air hangar the plane was pronounced safe for us.

So we got on it and came home to two discoveries. 

One, the code on the security gates of our building had changed during our absence and we had to climb over the 6 foot high vertically barred wrought iron gates, and get my extremely heavy suitcase over it ,to gain entrance. At five o’clock in the morning. 

And two, that our little adventure had made the front page of the Irish Times.