Another short trip report. Just an overnight in Copenhagen to go see a ballet and a little of the city.
Since this is on SAS it now fulfills the flight requirements for the status match from BA, and I am now SkyTeam Elite Plus until November 2026. Not sure how much use I'll make of it, but I can see some short trips to Paris and Amsterdam in my future...

Well, back to this trip. The intention was to do it reasonably cheaply, so I had a return train ticket booked from Stoke to Manchester airport. I don't mind taking the train, and it's a lot cheaper than a a taxi. But the state of the railways at the moment is pretty poor, so I may have to rethink this idea in future, I certainly now wouldn't risk it for a major trip. In this case, I got an email the night before saying my train had been cancelled. Boo. OK, so the choices are to get a slower train 20 minutes earlier or a slower train 20 minutes later. I opted to go for the early train, that's a 6 am departure, but I am an early riser anyway, so that's not a problem.
The next morning I got all my kit ready and walked to the station. When I arrived I was confused not to see my train on the departures board. It turns out that as I walked to the station they had decided that the early train also needed to be cancelled due to lack of crew. So now my remaining choices were to wait over an hour at the station and if they don't cancel the next train I would arrive at the airport train station at T-80 minutes. That's certainly doable with fast track. But what if they cancel that train as well? Then I would miss my plane. So I walked out the back of the station intending to call a taxi. But at that moment a hackney taxi dropped someone off (presumably to catch the train that was cancelled and they didn't know yet). The driver asked me if I wanted a taxi and I negotiated the price for the trip at the same price my cheap private hire usually charges, £62.
So after a bit of a needless early morning ramble I eventually got to the airport quite relaxed. But instead of cutting it fine, I was now massively early. T-200. There has been some talk recently of people being rejected trying to go through security pre T-180. But in this case it worked fine, so I don't think it's a hard rule, or the limit isn't precisely three hours despite what you are told if denied entry.

SAS don't have a lounge contract at MAN T1 unlike Air France or KLM at T2, so I decided to get breakfast at one of the cafes at the top of the escalator. There are three different places right next to each other but they are all more or less the same. So I went for the Giraffe option and a booth. Full english, bloody mary and tap water served up was fine, but at nearly £30 you can see why people would pay for the lounges. However the quality of the breakfast was better and the seating more comfortable than the T1 lounges, so it's probably only worth paying for lounges if you want to have a several drinks rather than just one. Installed in the booth I got my latest travel toy out. A 15.6" portable LCD screen that plugs into the phone. The phone has 1TB of storage, so I have a huge number of MP4 files on there to choose from. On this occassion I chose Samurai Assassin. It's a classic Toshiro Mifune film (you will recognise his face even if you don't recognise the name) and really a Shakespeare tragedy rather than the straight up gore fest that it sounds like. I spent about an hour and a half watching before getting restless and wandering round the airport. Eventually settling down to a window view and watching my bird arrive and taxi to stand, so I wandered off in pursuit.

Very odd gate, 24 I think. The gates in this spur are set out on both sides. But in the middle is the segregated lane for arriving passengers, so to reach gates on the other side from the corridor from the main departure area you have to go down some steps, walk under the arrivals corridor and then up the other side. It appears to be what my colleagues would call "an engineering solution" by which they mean it's a lash up but it works so shut up.
There was an odd concrete shoot by the gate, no idea what that was about, but I'm sure someone here will know :]