As if a 10-hour flight from Las Vegas to London wasn't enough. Cramped seats. No sleep. Hot. Claustrophobic. Tiny trays of food. Miniature bathrooms. Turbulence, lots of turbulence. No window. Night flight.—You get the idea.
And knowing that when we got there we would have only 70 minutes to make our connecting flight to Barcelona, the minimum allowed at Heathrow for an international connection.
I watched the screen on the back of the seat in front of me and followed our tracker across the globe. Over Greenland. Now flying above Scotland. Passing Liverpool. At 37,000 feet in elevation. Now dropping. Below 16,000. Getting lower. Now I could see green fields through the foggy clouds. The red rooftops and cars. Now touching the runway at 200 mph and in a lurch the reverse thrust is turned on and a minute later we come to a rest.
We had the unfortunate luck of having a man on our flight whose health became very serious during the final four hours of passage. An announcement was made asking for a doctor who could lend expertise to the situation. Once we landed the Captain told us that paramedics were attending the man and we could not leave until they were finished. After 40 minutes they decided to drape blankets around the man to keep his privacy. We filed out on the opposite side.
By now I was very worried that Kaitlyn and I would miss our flight. We walked with haste through the long halls of Terminal 3, following the purple signs that said “flight connections.” We were whisked to the front of a checkpoint where Kaitlyn was frisked and asked to empty a portion of her bag.
When we continued, I was dumbfounded when I checked the departure board. British Airways Flight 486 to Barcelona had been canceled! What would we do now? I had never experienced this before. I thought there was another flight in two hours. Maybe we could catch that.
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₤20
worth of goodies at the airport store.
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Luckily we met up with a group of four who were destined for the same flight. They had circled the terminal for an hour, getting the “run around” from several employees. They were from Vancouver and planning to begin a Mediterranean cruise from Barcelona. We decided to stay together.
We spent 1½ hours going through customs. The line snaked back and forth a half a dozen times. Every corner of the world seemed to be represented in this long queue: Asian, deep African, Muslim, Indian, American.
By the time we left the airport we had vouchers not only for the hotel, but for ₤20 worth of goods at the airport store. We loaded a bag with strawberry scones, British Pork & hogroast crisps, lentil curls, and Belgian wafers. They gave us two tickets for a 6:40 am flight to Amsterdam, with a connecting flight to Barcelona.
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| Waiting in line for the bus to our hotel. |
The hotel is nice. British Airways has treated us well. They gave us a voucher for dinner. We ate with our new friends from Vancouver: Jeff, Bill, Maureen, and Sue. We talked about the impossible price of housing in British Columbia, occupations, and health care (they have to wait a very, very long time if they go to the emergency room, but if it is bleeding, they can jump to the front of the line).
It is now past midnight, London time. My body has slept little in the last 36 hours, if at all. I am in a comfortable bed, happy that I was able to walk for half an hour with my daughter on an obscure road in London. We did it after dinner. Now I can finally sleep in a real bed before I have to wake up—and that's at 3:30 am! ♠
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| Heathrow Airport. This was the plane we took to Amsterdam. |
