Learner Dad: We arrived three hours early for our flight from Amsterdam back to Cork

The Amsterdam airport mission statement should read, ‘No queue shorter than two hours - we guarantee it!!’ Picture: istock

It felt like a nightmare.

My wife, the kids and I had arrived three hours early for our flight from Amsterdam back to Cork, because I’d seen a few things on Twitter about chaos in the airport due to staff shortages.

The woman at the baggage check-in told us to head straight to security, so off we went. The queue stretched halfway to Belgium. Still, we had over two and half hours to take off, that should be plenty of time.

An hour later, we still hadn’t got to the bottom of the stairs that would take us up to the security area. My wife decided to play our ‘will someone think of the kids’ card, and wriggled through the crowd to ask the security man if we could skip the queue. I didn’t say anything, but there must have been 1,000 people ahead of us, and there was no way it was going to work.

It worked. I hate when that happens, but at least she didn’t gloat.

We were allowed to jump the first bit of the queue.

Thirty minutes later, with an hour to take off, we finally turned into the corridor by security. There must have been another 1,000 people in that corridor. This new queue went nowhere for 30 minutes – we weren’t going to make the flight.

A door appeared to our right, with a woman guarding it. I asked her could we go through and get out of the queue. She said go on, and check if the KLM office at the bottom of the stairs could book us on the next flight to Cork.

Great.

No.

Two hours later I got to the top of the queue for the KLM office, where a woman gave me a ticket and told me I would be seen two hours after that. She had no idea what they were going to do for me.

This is when it started to feel like a nightmare. Not a scary monster one – more an annoying one where you’re trapped in a strange airport and no one seems able to help.

The Dutch passengers in the queue just shrugged their shoulders. They obviously don’t do upset or mortified. If this was in Ireland, we’d have been seeking out foreigners, apologising for the state of our airport.

Our kids didn’t seem to mind either. They had spent the best part of three hours in a scrum, with taller people all around, babbling in foreign languages. But they also shrugged and went on talking about Minecraft. At one point an airport employee appeared and started handing out biscuits. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my son so happy – he was living his best life at Departures 3 in Amsterdam airport.

We weren’t living our best life. We didn’t know where we were sleeping that night so we decided to cut our losses and book a late-night flight home with Aer Lingus.

Our bags were presumably off the missed flight and in the bowels of the building, so I joined another two-hour queue to get those back, while the kids played video games.

The Amsterdam airport mission statement should read, ‘No queue shorter than two hours - we guarantee it!!’

In the end, things got easier. The queue for Burger King was only ten minutes. We got most of our luggage back and we made the Aer Lingus flight with 20 minutes to spare.

Our kids were still living their best life. My daughter talked the ear off the woman next to her all the way to Cork. My son was feeling a bit left out, so he turned around and talked the other ear off her. They both conked out in the car on the way home.

It wasn’t really a nightmare. But it taught me a few things. Kids are grand as long as somebody keeps them topped up with biscuits. Dutch people are very tall and they keep things in perspective – I should be more like them. But more than anything, I’ll listen to my wife the next time she suggests we use our kids to do a spot of queue-jumping.