If a journey of a thousand steps begins with the first one, our journey of six plane flights, several train rides, many car rides, and lots and lots of steps began with a flight on American Airlines to Chicago. It was, of course, delayed, and we didn’t have much time to catch our next flight which was to London. While waiting to board in St. Louis, the gate agent kept stressing how we would just board quickly and everything would turn out fine. But when it came time to board, we did it in the same slow motion style that every plane is boarded with. The single point failure repeated until eveyone is at long last seated — an aviation reminder of the fatal flaw in Market-Garden. So we went from making the connecting flight, no problem according to the gate agent to there are 14 passengers on the same flight so they probably will hold the plane according to the stewardess.
The connecting flight information read by the stewardess as we were landing had our flight already departed for dear old England and we would have to go to the ticketing desk for another flight. I thought to myself, great, the wheels have already come off before the wagon has even begun to roll. But when we taxied into the gate, we could see a plane at the gate our flight to London had supposedly left from. Were we so late that another plane was already using our gate?
When we deplaned, the gate agent informed us that our eyes weren’t lying, the flight had been held. So we dashed (after I paid a brief visit to the men’s room) through O’Hare — all the way back into the main part and then back out another concourse. The lady with lots of kids and even more carryon made it with a beet red face. An older couple came strolling up long after we arrived — I guess they figured as long as they were holding the plane, why rush.
Then it was off the London on a 777. The in-flight entertainment system was really neat. Everybody had their own little screen in the back of the seat in front of them and headphones. My favorite part was the flight info section that showed our progress on maps of varying scales along with information like ground speed, altitude, and outside air temperature. I was amazed by how long we flew through cloud tops (and their chop) — hour after hour at a ground speed of 600 mph. As near as I could tell, there were clouds all the way from St. Louis to London.
Heathrow looks like a relic from the early industrial era. Long hallways that twist and turn and lead ever onward without exit or bathroom (WC in Europspeak — which I took to calling “The Claude” as WC was pronounced like “Debussy” there). We had to switch from Terminal 3 to Terminal 4 and after taking a bus to Terminal 4 we had to stand in what has to be the longest line I’ve ever been in to go back through security. It stretched halfway on to forever, and when you got there, it turned a corner and stretched the rest of the way to forever before turning again into a room that opened out into the security checkpoint. And this was before the new security requirements that are causing even longer lines (I imagine they now stretch to forever and back).
When we finally emerged in the brand spanking new gate area, my daughter exclaimed this was a mall, not an airport. Unfortunately, our flight to Geneva had no gate listed on the flight info screens, so we trudged back to the check-in we had bypassed because I had printed out our boarding passes for British Airways just before we left home. We were unofficially told that the flight was delayed (thus giving us the late trifecta) but that it would leave from gate 19 sometime in the future. So 45 minutes late we began to board for a 90 minute flight to Geneva. At least we were only connecting with a rental car at this point so a delay just didn’t matter.
Over 9 hours in the air and a day later on the calendar we had at last arrived. While Geneva’s airport was much more modern than Heathrow, it also featured the interminable corridor to civilization – although there was a Claude halfway there, unlike Heathrow where you had to make it all the way to the end before you could get relief. But none of that mattered as we had gotten the worst part of travel, namely the travel, over with. Hurrah!
