You’re at the airport, your flight is delayed for six more hours, and none of your electronic devices is working. How do you pass the time?

This happened to me once but it was back in 1977 so there were no electronic devices to miss. I was setting off on my first overseas trip and I was waiting for my flight at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport. At first it was not so bad. Hubby-To-Be had come to see me off so I had company for several hours. We had lunch and explored the airport. Neither of us had ever been in an international airport before so we found it interesting to see planes taking off and landing and to spot the logos of airlines that didn’t fly into Adelaide. In the end he had to leave before my flight was called, he was catching a train back to Adelaide that night so I ended up seeing him off not the other way around. I felt pretty forlorn after that. I was only nineteen and I was a bit nervous about what I was about to do. I think that I ended up reading the book that I’d brought to read on the plane. The delay was nine hours so when I did finally board my flight I just went to sleep.

These days I’m a more relaxed traveller and airport delays don’t worry me too much. I don’t fly often so I still find unfamiliar airports a bit of a novelty. If I’m stuck somewhere I haven’t been before I’ll still explore, look in the shops and take photos of planes if I find some good viewing points. I do love free airport Wi-Fi but if it’s not available I’m used to managing  without. I don’t own a smart phone so I don’t have the option of Twitter or Angry Birds anyway. I chat to people sometimes and that can be a very rewarding way of passing the time. I listen to the flight announcements for other flights and wonder why some people leave it till the last minute to board their flight. I would hate to be the person that held up the whole flight and would be so embarrassed if I was called out by name. I still normally travel with a book in my bag so I’d eventually settle down somewhere near a monitor and read, if I didn’t have a book I’d go and see what the airport newsagent had to offer. I will generally choose a book over magazines because you get more reading material for your dollar. Taking a notebook and pens as some others have suggested sounds a great idea. You can get  a lot of ideas for posts while you are sitting around waiting. I’ll be doing that in future.

Nobody likes being delayed and having a boring wait at a terminal when you want to be somewhere else but it’s better than being featured in some future episode of “Air Crash Investigation”.