The Grand Departure

At last, the day was finally here! Our 7-month honeymoon adventure to India and beyond was just about to begin. We were knackered from the long days getting the house Airbnb ready and so I was looking forwards to the night flight to finally catch up on some sleep BUT this didn’t quite go to plan, and instead happened 24 hours later – the short story being that James had a visa but I had some problems with mine which meant it was still being processed. I was optimistically hoping that I could still board the plane as long as my visa came through when the flight had landed so I could exit into India. We soon realised at the check-in desk that’s not how it works at all.

We stayed at the airport whilst I repeatedly kept refreshing the visa update page in pure miraculous hope that my visa would come within the next hour so we could board the flight. The miracle didn’t happen so we reluctantly walked over to the ticket counter to tell them to take us off the flight and we would rebook when the visa came through.

We had repeatedly been told to tell BA that it was our honeymoon which we thankfully obliged in doing, in hope of just a cheeky celebratory champagne but it actually ended up as a huge favour of them “holding” our tickets and just having to pay a small change in ticket fee rather than pay for two new tickets to India again.

Our knight in shining armour, the fabulous Sam Wust, picked us up from the airport. I woke up to a lovely email the next morning stating that my visa was granted at 3.23AM. So at 8am James gave me the nudge to get up and sort out the flight with Avios who got us out on the next available flight which was 24 hours exactly after the original.

That day, we had some chilled Jess and James time in the town of Ickenham. We had been so busy with the house and seeing family/ friends before going away it was lovely to just go out for brunch the two of us – something James reminded me that I said we would start doing after park runs, but each Saturday recently I’ve just said a flat out nope to park runs, so we’ve now said more brunches without the need of a park run.

The next day, Sam was incredibly kind to give us a lift back to Heathrow for our flight. We got checked in without any issues and even managed to find one of the staff members who pulled a few strings so we weren’t starting our honeymoon off with a huge expense. we stopped by to thank them, then went to enjoy our last Wagamama of the year. This past week has been full of lots of lasts for the year.

No free champagne in sight but we had now touched down in Mumbai with two physical visa stamps in our passport.