9/5–Off to London we go…maybe

Happy Labor Day! On this holiday, we are driving to Atlanta to begin our London and T-A cruise back to Montreal. We will be meeting Natalie and Roger for 2 days in London, before moving on to Southampton and the Azamara Quest T-A. 

The drive to Atlanta goes relatively well – we do hit a few stop and go moments, but we make it in just over 4 hours, which isn’t all that bad.  We time it perfectly for the airport shuttle from the hotel, and we arrive at the check in counter about 6:30 – with almost 4 hours to spare!  We figure we’ll just hang out at a restaurant for a while – the flight is scheduled for 10:10pm, so we can snack, then have dinner on the plane.  But once we do the math, the lounge is a better way to go rather than a restaurant.  The food isn’t all that great, but we get free wi-fi, drinks and a better place to sit around for 3 plus hours.

We head down to the gate around 9:00 or so, and begin our wait. And wait. And wait.  We just happen to hit the British Airways check-in system meltdown.  Joy!  We were lucky enough to check in early, so our bags and boarding passes are all electronic.  But there are about 120 people who came in behind us that aren’t so lucky. They have been standing in line landside for hours and the  BA team has to do everything manually – including hand written boarding passes – which then makes it really hard to get through security, not to mention taking forever to actually check and process.

To the BA staff and crew’s credit – they are fantastic about the whole situation.  They keep us completely up to date, including the captain who comes out and tells us exactly what is going on – he even tells us that they almost scrapped the flight, but have managed to keep it on the schedule, albeit very late.  In addition, the flight attendant crew comes around the waiting area with juices and water…and Snickers bars!  Seriously.  I’m not going to argue with that!

But, the fact still remains that the clock keeps ticking away and we are still in the terminal.  Finally, they begin to board us at 1:30AM.  It’s not exactly the speediest or most organized, they end up just taking the tickets and walking us around the ticket counter, but we all get aboard.  We push back around 1:45, the captain gives us the weather information, flight time, etc., and we start to taxi.

Then we stop.

Oh, this is so not good.  We sit on the taxi-way for about an hour when the captain comes back on and says he is terribly sorry but we can’t fly tonight.  They couldn’t match the manifest (the crew had come by and taken a manual head count earlier) and they had problems with the luggage and weight.  By the time it got sorted out, the crew had timed out.  The captain even tried to calculate flying to Manchester – but even that would take too long. So…we’re scrubbed! 

But now the fun begins.  In the captain’s words, “it is going to be a tedious and long process” to get us off the plane. They were working to get us all hotel rooms, get the ground crew back to get us to the gate since everyone had gone home, take the luggage off the plane (oh and btw a bunch of luggage never even made it on the plane and is waiting at the check in counter) and then get us shuttles to the hotel.  Remember it is now 4:00 AM.  So, in the meantime, we were served our evening meal.  Hey – it’s free, it’s dinner, by now it feels like it should be dinner, and it gives us something to do for a while.

We finally disembark around 5:00am and make our way down to the baggage claim, grab our luggage, go back up to the check in counter, sign in, get our marching orders which entail going back down to baggage claim, taking the shuttle to the domestic terminal, then taking the shuttle to the Sheraton hotel where our rooms will be waiting for us.

The Amazing Race is on!  There are 170 or so other folks doing the same thing here, so Cathy and Ed are on it.  We speed walk to the shuttle, end up on the very next one, sitting in front.  Grab our bags, over the driver’s protest that he could do it, and jump off the shuttle to speed walk over to the Sheraton shuttle where we are first in a very quickly growing line for the shuttle.  After about 10 minutes, the shuttle pulls up and the driver, Tee, just looks at us and shakes his head.  We jump on first, get the our bags stowed and then watch as he proceeds to stuff as many people and bags as humanly possible on that bus.  He was so nice – he still left over 20 people in line and started calling for help almost immediately after leaving the terminal.

We decide on our strategy as we drive – Ed will hop out and go get the room, while I wait for the bags.  Turns out to be the right move since our bags are last, and by the time I get inside, the line is long and Ed is just finishing up with the desk clerk.  Shuttle strategy accomplished!

The room we are assigned is great, it is at the end of the hall away from other rooms, facing the active runways, but the windows are so thick, they are virtually soundproof. Makes for nice sleeping as we lay our tired heads down on the pillows (on the super comfy bed) at 6:05 AM for our “night’s rest.”

But will we fly tomorrow?  Oh, I mean later today?  Stay tuned!