A stag party stranded in Amsterdam due to airport chaos took on a 230-mile adventure – ensuring wedding speech content for everyone.
Alex Sisan, 29, took 13 of his friends to the Dutch capital on Thursday and spent two days boozing and seeing the sights.
The lads were supposed to fly home to Gatwick Airport on Saturday and even arrived at Schiphol airport five hours before they were supposed to take off.
But their easyJet flight was cancelled last minute, forcing them to come up with some other ways to get home to Worthing, West Sussex.
They decided to get a train to Calais, France, and then hop on a ferry to Dorset, The Mirror reports.
On their way, the guys discovered health and safety rules mean people are not allowed to board the ferry on foot – but cyclists are.
Luckily the group were stopping over in Brussels in Belgium and Lille in France, so they frantically looked for bicycles to buy in the few hours they had in each city.
They bartered with second-hand shops and searched Facebook Marketplace for a good deal.
All but one of them managed to get a bike by the time they finished their stop over in Lille but, in keeping with the theme of the trip, the friends ran into another challenge.
They discovered that the train service taking them to Calais only allowed passengers to bring fold-up bikes with them.
So the friends hurriedly had to find taxis to get them to their ferry – at €350 (£299) per car.
Miraculously, the guys arrived with one hour to spare and managed to make their boat.
The 14th lad who had not managed to get a bike convinced a kind couple to let him sit in their car to cross the Channel.
All of the group made it back to the UK by Sunday morning, albeit exhausted.
Alex said: ‘Looking back, the experience was so stressful and like something from a movie or a Top Gear challenge.
‘But it was so much fun and a brilliant story that I will be telling at the wedding, and hopefully to my kids –and then their kids!’
EasyJet apologised and said it intends to reimburse them for ‘any reasonable expenses’.
It comes as airports and airlines across the UK have been plagued with chaos in recent weeks as staffing levels failed to keep up with the surge in travellers.
Of 10,662 flights scheduled for the Jubilee weekend, 305 of them got the axe, according to aviation data firm Cirium data (via BBC) – affecting thousands of passengers.
Realistically, disruption will continue for a while – before things start to look up.
Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy told Travel Weekly on May 31: ‘This is about as bad as it will get, I think everything will start to improve from here.
‘All the companies I know are working on recruiting people, so things will get better.’
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