Tuesday and it’s travel day for the delegates going to Cannes in the south of France to attend the Amsys / Agnosys Apple Summer Camp.
For a couple of reasons (Mrs was at work and the car needs a service) I am taking public transport to Stanstead airport in Essex to fly EasyJet into Nice airpor.
Typically with London’s transport system there was a problem. Somone decided to act a bit strange at Stratford station and the whole of the eastern railway service ground to a hault for 45 minutes. When you are travelling to catch a plane it is very frustrating. Thankfully, I am retentive enough that I built-in enought buffer time to my journey that it wasn’t a big issue.
So the journey went; Romford to Liverpool Street (£5), Liverpool Street to Stanstead (£17). Some of the guys here spen that much on their entire journey by train from other parts of Europe.
Britain once lead the world in rail transport and now we are a joke, it saddens me.
Check in at Stanstead was relatively painless but security there now dictates that as we go airside we have to take off our shoes. I was tempted to strip completely but there were kids around and I didn’t want to scar them for life.
I watched as a toddler was patted down and swiped with an explosives detector and pondered on who was winning the war on terror.
Flight was OK, managed to find one of the only seats without another passenger next to me (in a three seat row), alas not a window seat but you can’t have everything.
Landed in Nice about 5ish and met up with two other delegates. We were eventually met by a chap from Amsys who gave us 100 Euro and put us in a cab to Cannes. 85 of those Euros later and we were at the Hotel.
Interesting(ish) fact. Nice only issues 476 taxi licenses so when they come up for sale, they change hands at upto half a million euros each – hense the expensive taxi’s.
Evening meal + Free Drink and bed was the order of the night and apart from arranging an internet connection (49 Euros for a POS WiFi – pronounced “wiffy” in French) that’s it for Day 1.