I had plenty of time Sunday morning to get up, drink coffee, get my personal act together, go get breakfast and then pack. So this I did. I hadn’t tried the hotel breakfast the day before – it was a serve-yourself continental breakfast and I had a bran muffin and a yogurt. It was pretty depressing, especially after yesterday’s yummy tea. One lesson I’ve learned from this trip is that I really really like a good B&B breakfast and I didn’t really get any on this trip. I’ll take that into account the next time I book a vacation lodging.
I really didn’t want to go through dealing with overweight luggage when I checked in, so had planned to stuff the duffel as full as possible and keep the suitcase light. I didn’t have a lot to jettison, but decided to leave behind an old pair of sweatpants just to save room and weight.
Then it was time to leave. I had to get my gigantic luggages down three (well, six) flights of stairs, but down is easier than up. Basically I did them one at a time, one flight at a time, and got the duffle all the way to the bottom of the stairs. The receptionist looked up, “do you need help with your luggage?”. “just that one”, I pointed to the suitcase on the landing one flight up. She went and hauled it down, no fear.
My plan was to get an Uber to Heathrow – not cheap, but much easier than navigating public transportation. (It was easy coming into London on the first day – I just took the Heathrow Express and my hotel was right by Paddington.) For one thing, the Parsons Green stop didn’t have a lift. So I asked the receptionist, ‘if I can’t get an Uber, can you summon a taxi for me?’? She assured me that she could, but at that time on a Sunday, I shouldn’t actually have a problem getting an Uber. And she was correct.
The Uber driver, Sanghir, was clearly of East Asian origin, but had a British accent, so I asked if he’d been born ‘here’ and he had. His family was from Pakistan. He was super-nice, we chatted all the way there. I thought he might actually be g-y, but it came up that he and his wife had ‘just started a family’. (well, I guess he could have still been g-y, but never mind) And we got to Heathrow in plenty of time. Do you know that they charge you 5 pounds just to drop someone off at the airport? That’s ridiculous! But he didn’t have to pay that, I did.
I had booked a code-sharing flight on Virgin Atlantic through Delta, and this had meant, basically, that all attempts to check in online (even though I’d gotten an email inviting me to do so) had bombed out, so I was going to have to check in onsite. I got in terminal 3, where they had zones for different airlines. I was at the opposite end from A, which was what I needed, and boy was the terminal crowded with clueless travelers. Fought fought fought my way to A, where I tried to check in using a kiosk, and was denied. I wasn’t even sure what to do next, so I asked a VA rep and she told me ‘go to B, the line’s shorter and they can help you’. This was correct, although the line was still pretty long. I couldn’t believe how many families with a thousand kids and even more suitcases were checking in. Every once in a while, a queeny rep would sail by, saying, ‘anyone for San Francisco at 11:20?’ and if there were, they’d get pulled out and processed quickly.
Finally I got up to the counter and checked in. The rep did my passport, looked at his screen, looked concerned, and said, ‘we’ve oversold this flight, so we’re moving you from premium down to economy, but you’ll get a free ticket’. What? No! I asked if I could get an upgrade instead (which, depending on cost, I might have been willing to shill out for to avoid steerage). He went off to the back to consult with others.
Then queeny rep came up to me with a tablet and said, “Mr. Peterson, we have a seat for you but…” and then laid out the same deal – for a downgrade, I’d get a free ‘return’ ticket (meaning, I guess, a one-way ticket back to the UK), But, I established, I could reject your deal and just stay where I was in the seat I bought? Him, disappointed, “Yes”. “I’ll do that then.” This fat ass wanted the wide seat and the booze, dammit, especially for an 8-hour flight.
Luggage went through with no overage for weight (yay!) and I just had my knapsack and a totebag with a sweater for the airplane and my knitting and room for duty-free left. Off to security. Because I have a pacemaker, I had to do a lot more emptying of pockets etc. than I think I would have otherwise, to go through the safe machine, and I ended up shoving stuff in random pockets of the knapsack, tote bag, etc. And then realized I still had my neck pouch on with spare credit cards etc., so that ended up going through on its own. Got to the other side, waited for my stuff, reassembled (forgetting one thing, as I found out).
Off to duty free. I’ve told this story before – I like to blow my cash at duty free, so I don’t run into the ‘save it for the next trip, only to find out they’ve changed the money’ issue I ran into in 2018. I needed to buy goodies for my upstairs neighbors, who’d been taking in my mail for two weeks, so in a nod to the great tea I’d had on Saturday, bought three containers of Fortnum & Mason biscuits. Waited in a long line – and the help kept asking the line if anyone was paying by card – if so, they could use the self-checkout and zoom ahead. I was trying to blow the cash, so no. And then I got up to the register and couldn’t find the cash. I’d shoved it somewhere during security, and now didn’t know where it was. Rolling my eyes at my own stupidity, I paid with card and kept on going. (I did find it later, at home when unpacking.)
Out of duty free. They weren’t going to post our gate until an hour before the flight, so I dodged the many many other passengers and found a somewhat protected seat for a while. Then realized I was actually hungry and didn’t want to wait until the airplane lunch, so went to Pret a Manger and got some sort of hot wrap, which was actually pretty nice. And by the time I finished that, they’d posted our gate and it said BOARDING. What? Our flight time isn’t for an hour yet. OK, then, walk briskly to the gate, and use the loo before going through … an odd setup, where they were checking our boarding passes before you got in the waiting room part of the gate. I was that middle ‘premium’ class, but they had two lines, ‘economy’ and ‘priority’. I went through economy just in case, and the line wasn’t long. I did notice that they told the economy people ahead of me, ‘you’ll board when they call group X’, but they told me to just go right ahead and get on the plane.
Like before, I was in the middle section, but on the aisle. The other two seats were a mother and her daughter (maybe 10), who was sitting by me. Luckily, the daughter ignored me and I ignored her. Got the welcome aboard bubbly, did some knitting, and then we took off.
I was going to actually do some work on my laptop, including updating these blog posts, but the WIFI went down not long after we took off and they had no way to reactivate it. (They also had problems with the inflight entertainment system, but they rebooted it.)
For meal #1, I opted for the vegetarian truffle mac and cheese, which was yummy. Among the little side plates that came with it was a cheese plate, so it was mac and cheese and cheese. Dessert was a ‘lemon posset’, one of those Britishy dessert words that we don’t run into in the US, it was pretty good. A glass of wine, and then some coffee later. Mostly I read. They handed out popsicles at one point, that was fun. And then we had a second meal about an hour before landing, another ‘tea’ in miniature form – finger sandwiches and a scone. All in all, a very easy flight.
Off the plane. Passport lines were a little funky, as they kept making us move around, but once up to the agent, I didn’t have any problem getting through. And the luggage came out very quickly.
At LaGuardia, I usually get an Uber, but this was Kennedy and I decided to just try the taxi line. Which was outside and across lines of traffic and very full with people and kind of a mess (again, lots of families with many members and huge amounts of luggage). The way they were bringing up the taxis would have worked better if the taxies themselves were trying to work with the system, but watching them, it was like they’d never even driven before. But eventually got a taxi, maybe 45 minutes later, and it was off to home.
The highway from JFK to about Flushing Meadows is always a mess of traffic, but it always clears up after that. Got home probably 5:45 or so, and was grateful to find the apartment in fine shape (though stuffy, as I went around opening the storm windows). When we went to France, we came home to find a moth infestation in one of the rooms that took us weeks to get rid of, so I was grateful nothing seemed to have gone wrong.
Decided to just dump my stuff, do minor cleanup and go around the corner to the Mexican place for drinks and dinner. Then back home for lots of fizzy water (still dehydrated) and to watch the Olympics. I chose balance beam final, which was fascinating and terrifying. I think only two of the finalists managed to stay on the beam all the way through.
So that’s it! It was largely a great trip. I’ll get caught up to present day in the next post (I hope)
The Toast Point Page 