As we continue to look back at our trip to Wembley, we bring you a story (in their own words) of two hardcore Dale fans who were determined not to miss the biggest match of their Dale supporting lives. Messageboard regular 'BrenDale' tells all here.
As some of you know me and my now fiance where on holiday for the 2nd leg where we were sat glued to the screen, converting some Spurs fans into Dale fans for the playoffs, and enjoying every minute almost as much as we would if we were in our usual seats in the WMG. The final penalty went in much to the joy of all the fellow 'fans for the day' and me and my missus. Thoughts then went straight to returning home at 2:30am on the morning of the final and the excitement of watching Dale at Wembley.
so, sunday evening in sharm el sheikh we board our coach for the airport and as soon as our bottoms touch the seats there is an announcment.
'ladies and gentlemen, due to techinical difficulties with the computers at air traffic control in manchester, your flight has been delayed'
oh sh!t, me and the missus look at each other, it may be alright though, we are landing at 2:30, coaches aint leaving til 8, we have 4 or so hours spare.
'due to these problems in England we are having to transfer to another hotel as the flight is delayed 20 hours!'
we both look at eachother.......eyes start welling up and we both fight back the tears.
any other holiday I wouldn't be bothered, but we have to get home, no questions asked.
We arrived at our 'new hotel' and straight to the rep...... 'we have to get to manchester by 6am tomorrow, we dont care how or how much just get us there'
no flights at all to Manchester, time to hold back the tears again.
We don't care about manchester then........what about Liverpool, Birmingham, east Midlands, anywhere on route to Wembley!!???
Sorry there are no seats available on any flights to England until your flight back to manchester at 7pm bank holiday monday.
This just isn't good enough, so again the tears start to come, this cant be happening.
What can we do..........Dublin!??? is a hell of a lot closer to london than sharm el sheikh!!!
Are there any flights to dublin???.....yes we have 2 seats left, the flight has been delayed by a couple of hours so you can make it (finally something is going our way!), flight leaves in 2 hours!!!
JACKPOT!!!!! get us on that plane.....
10pm GMT sat in a seat on a plane to Dublin, in the meantime we have booked a flight from Dublin to Heathrow, gets us in britain for 10am, plenty of time to get wembley.
So we land in Dublin, manage to meet our connecting flight with 20 mins left to check in.
Sat on the plane waiting to leave Dublin.....
'good morning ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately due to a problem with the air traffic system the plane will not be leaving on time'
me and the missus look at eachother, this just cannot be happening!!! What do we have to do to get to Fooking Wembley!!!!!!
luckily this delay was just half an hour
we land in heathrow 11am just in time to get our bags and changed into our dale clobber to arrive at wembley an hour before kick off.
This was the most stressful, annoying, heart breaking, expensive journey to a football game......but one we are so glad we did not miss, regardless of the result.....