Weekend in Stockholm in Aug 2023: Day 5 – Stockholm (ARN) to London (LHR)

Arlanda International Airport is not the most exciting place to spend a few hours, but it’s good enough for us whilst we waited for our flight back to Heathrow.

Our flight was due to leave from Gate 86, which appears to be the standard gate used by BA. We headed down there about 55 mins before departure time and we got caught at passport control where a couple were stuck with two agents and the agents had to ring someone to get them cleared.

Once the backlog was cleared at passport control, it was less than a minute to walk around to Gate 86 and we formed the start of the priority boarding queue.

With Vick’s sciatica, that must have seemed a long way!

We ended up waiting about 10 mins before boarding started. They called Groups 1 and 2 together – perhaps that is the norm now for BA?

On into our normal seats in row 1 and there was plenty of space in the overhead lockers for our bags. We settled down and looked forward to seeing our pussy-cats again.

We pushed back 10 mins early and we were taking off at the same time as the scheduled departure time. That’s a new one for me. We are normally running late, not early!

We enjoyed a glass of cold water when the drinks service started. The cup of tea I ordered hit the mark as well.

There were no menus circulated – one of the cabin crew confirmed that was due to them not having enough of the menus for one each. We managed to secure a menu, since we wanted to check what the options were.

Vick went for a chicken salad dish and I had the cheese raviloi. Both were pretty decent. The starter was some butternut squash and wild rice thing, which was very odd. But the cheese and pudding were great.

The rest of the flight whizzed by as a result of us snoring on the way home.

We arrived into Gate 09 at T5 and there was minimal waiting for the Stand Guidance to be turned on. The cabin crew noted that things seemed to have been « like clockwork » over the past few days. Probably too early to tell whether something has changed, or whether BA has just been lucky recently!

It was a relatively short walk back to passport control. With Vick walking slowly and me expecting to take ages to get through passport control, I headed off to the « seek assistance » queue.

There were very few passengers waiting either at the kiosks or in the « seek assistance » queue, so I thought why not? So I walked into Number 11 kiosk and waited for my rejection.

Unbelievably, I got through first time! Wow!

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