Challenge 1 – getting there

When on a journey to the Falkland Islands, deciding to go and doing the packing are in many ways the easiest part of the whole effort.  That remains the case even when you’re packing for a whole year there and have had to organise shipping of what seems to be enough lego to rebuild Legoland.

The Falkland Islands may be a UK overseas territory, but it is not served by a normal commercial route from a normal airport like Heathrow, Manchester or Gatwick.  No, to get to the Falkland Islands directly you must take one of 2 flights a week organised by the RAF from RAF Brize Norton.  It is a normal commercial plane, although without the mod-cons of transatlantic flights as there are no tvs in the back of the seats.  There again, it’s also not as cramped as the plane isn’t as full as those going to Disneyland.

If travelling with a family though, the biggest issue may well be the timings.  With no timing restrictions on when they can fly, flights to the Falkland Islands leave in the middle of the night and check in closes 3 hours before departure.  Occupying waiting time requires military planning, especially if you (in common with most mortal mums) have not devoted the past 7 years of your life to raising your children to be happy with various complicated paper games and crafts and improving books as their only entertainment.  My preparations for the flight went something like this:

1. Purchase tablets (1 per child as 7 years of parenting has taught sufficient common sense that sharing will not be happening with electronic entertainment and the extra expense is worth the lack of fights )
2. Purchase headphones to avoid said children irritating everyone else on the flight with endless renditions of Paw Patrol/Pokemon/any and all game music.
3. Load tablets with various games to keep them occupied
4. Hastily purchase SD cards to expand storage as you realise that you don’t have room for 18 hours entertainment on the built in storage
5. Even more hastily purchase a power bank in fear that the tablets may run out of power on the flight
6. Pray that you have sufficient electronic entertainment to keep the children quiet for 18 hours.

With tickets booked (done for us by the Falkland Islands Government), passports located eventually from their “safe place” and work permit printed, turning up at the airport was next on the list.  A week ahead of time though we were notified that due to maintenance work the airport had changed.  Fortunately only to Birmingham and equally fortunately that was still close enough to my parents to beg a lift.  Comfort-wise it made little difference.  Airport seats are after all airport seats and the shops are shut at midnight.  Birmingham has some extra marble tiling and possibly slightly better options for tea/coffee whilst waiting, but that’s about it.

To a harassed mum on her own, the biggest issue was not the airport we were flying from, but the news on check-in that there would be a 7 hour delay at Cape Verde due to the weather at Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands.  A 2 hour stop over is normal, a 7 hour delay gave new meaning to “my heart was filled with dread”. It probably gave everybody elses’ hearts cause to fill with dread too when they realised there were 2 young children on their flight.

For anyone who might ever be visiting Cape Verde though, the 7 hour experience means that I can now authoritatively inform you that the transit area has sufficient space for trunki-racing, the duty free sells impressively sized bags of haribo and there are plug sockets in the pillars, which, if you come with an adaptor for two pins, will enable you to charge tablets, phones and laptops.  In non-essential information, there is also a cafe selling tea, coffee and alcohol, though the latter was  unfortunately unavailable to me as the flight was by orders of the RAF dry.

The dry nature of the flight also removed the otherwise pleasing element of flying – the decision as to which drink to try at 30,000ft in the air.  This was instead replaced by regular demands from the children as to when they were going to get food, interspersed with complaints that they did not like anything that was provided.  To be fair to them, the airplane food was not the best I have encountered, but field trials prove that when the option is going hungry or eating the food provided, my children choose haribo.  As any normal mother would do after over 12 hours of travelling already, I lost the will to resist and simply restricted the dosage to groups of 5 or 10 haribo at a time.  This was, I am sure you will understand, by way of being a practical experiment to benefit other travellers rather than exhaustion on my part.  The results are that long flights are of benefit in removing the bouncing off the ceiling effect of haribo consumption.  I naturally attribute my excellent decision making around hairbos as the cause of the two separate sets of compliments I received on my sons’ behaviour on the flight rather than any temporary aberrance on their part of their more typical behaviour.  Now to see if a repeat performance (of the good behaviour bit) can be arranged for when I fly them back to the UK a year from now.