travel woes
We just got back from visiting
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eldar's family. The visit was nice. The traveling was not.
Outbound:
I had insisted we leave tons of time to drive to Newark (2.5 hours away, approximately). We got to Newark at 4pm for a 9pm flight. Oops. They had overbooked the lot we had reserved, so got sent to another one; that worked out fine, though. At bag drop we were told that the flight would be delayed as the incoming plane had left Heathrow late.
Newark Terminal B is one of the shoddiest long haul terminals I have ever had the displeasure to see. Facilities consisted of the worst duty free shop ever, a newsstand, and a kiosk selling sandwiches. That's it.
The flight was delayed 2 hours. There were 293 passengers on our flight; 141 of them were the Ramsey High School Marching Band, which was taking part in the New Year's Day parade in London.
In order to make our train from Paddington, we had to shell out for the Heathrow Express. (Good thing we'd left the extra 2 hours, right?) It was good that we did, too, because the train was packed.
Inbound:
Despite leaving what we all thought was a generous amount of time, we missed our train. Neil's dad drove us to Tiverton Parkway as he's beaten the train there. He didn't. First Great Western wouldn't honor our tickets on a later service and dinged us to the tune of £112.50 one way. And that was despite leaving after 9am. Then we got delayed 20 minutes due to signaling problems.
When we got to Heathrow the fun started. Bag drop (we'd done online check-in) was chaos; luckily they opened a new line next to ours and didn't call people over--we just dashed up.
At security, both our bags got pulled off at X-ray for search. Neil discovered that the sippy cup he'd pulled out was not the one she'd been using, and that there was a full one below. Oops. Mine was more fun. They found a cup in an outside pocket that had been there since we went to Philadelphia. Meaning that Newark security ignored it, instead of following the rules and pulling it off for search. Tut tut.
We'd been warned to leave a lot of time at the gate, so with the security delay on top of that, we were a bit rushed (needed lunch, some shopping--I wanted the Stieg Larsson book that won't be available for months in the US).
We got to the gate an hour before departure. The queue was huge. Every passenger had their bag searched, plus they got patted down and shoes removed. We missed the priority boarding, and the whole search thing took so long that we left 40 minutes late (luckily, it was a fast flight). Flight was all families (I counted 12 strollers at the end!) and noisy. I'm sure a militant childfree person is busy writing a blog post about why none of the children should have been there.
We got into Newark and went to passport control. It was a mob scene. It took us over an hour to get through. They were sending people from the citizens/green card lane down to the visitors' side and even through the diplomatic lanes to try to clear it. It was capped off by getting stuck right behind some guy who was entering on his green card for the first time, which means extra processing. Ugh.
And then Neil got to drive 2.5 hours home. Total journey time, 22 hours.
I'm almost glad we're not going back till summer 2011--we just can't do Christmas travel every year.
