Hello and welcome to the Independence Travel Podcast with me Simon Calder.

Today I'm in the lovely or beautifully located Swedish town of Luleyur.

This is pretty much at the top of the Gulf of Bothnia.

And if you're wondering where that is, it's the kind of armpit between the

countries of Sweden and Norway and where they're joined on to Finland and the rest of the

Eurasian landmass. The sea in every direction it's a beautiful place to be there's birdsong

and there's a tale to be told of weird

stuff happening. I sort of run through my odd journey getting here because it was indeed one of those

things where just weird thing after weird thing happened. Starting with the flight being late.

You might be thinking, what's he talking about?

Flight 25 minutes late?

Absolutely nothing to see here.

What's going on?

Well, the thing is, it was part of the first wave of Ryanair flights out of Stansted in the morning.

And that's significant because there are dozens of flights set to depart.

Mine was at quarter to seven. Everybody was sitting there all strapped in with ten minutes to go.

The captain said, great, thanks. We'll be on our way in the next few minutes.

But we weren't. And in the end, we were 25 minutes late because there was congestion leaving Stansted.

Now, what surprised me was that the captain said,

well, this is due to high levels of air traffic,

but the schedule is pretty much the same every morning

and I was just very surprised by that.

...