I recently read an autobiography by a guy who quit his hectic job in New York City to move to a remote island in the south pacific (Palau to be exact). In any event, he had insight into the difference between a “traveler” and a “tourist,” As he stated it, a “tourist” always knows what’s happening next. Being that Nicole and I are standby “travelers,” our notion of what was happening next got altered many times today.
For a while, we have looked to go to northern England and check out some quaint towns etc. That was the plan when I set aside some days a few months back. As our travel days approached, the forecast appeared rather unappealing. It looked to be extremely rainy and cold — even by English standards. Nicole and I weren’t too keen on doing that after a record-breaking season of rain in Los Angeles, so we opened up discussion for other options including Mallorca with a stopover in Copenhagen to avoid Heathrow and a security workers strike.
And thus we went to LAX thinking we were about to board a SAS (Scandinavian) flight to Copenhagen. There were supposed to be 15 business class seats available to us. The ticket agents were insistent that they did not exist. Nicole could have bought multiple business class tickets for that particular flight at that same moment, which the agents did not seem to understand (but did insinuate that we were clearly looking at the wrong date). We weren’t. They said they could definitely get us seats though — in 41 and 42B (middle seats in separate rows). Thinking we were golden for a much better seat minutes before this interaction, this development was not welcomed with open arms by either of us.
They then impatiently insisted we check our small crew bags, an unusual ask for standby travelers on long-haul staff travel. We said we would check them at the gate because we needed more time to discuss our options. They scoffed at this. This is the problem when airlines hire third party employees to run the ticket counters at outstations. Throughout the years, we have been asked by “KLM” to buy a full fare ticket for a flight that had 160 open seats, got told by “United” in the Azores that we couldn’t be checked in because we had paper tickets (we didn’t), and flustered “LATAM” agents barely let us check in because they believed there was no way that we’d be able to go through security and get to a gate in an hour and a half.
We checked again about seats at the gate, but it was just more third party employees who seemed clueless, but with a touch of condescension. We were so annoyed by everyone, that we decided to cancel our plans to Copenhagen. With that being said, we didn’t actually have a backup plan, so we sat in a more open section of the international terminal to formulate a plan. Business class was out of the question, but it would be nice to at least have seats together. We settled on a United flight to London Heathrow, our old nemesis. Being #1 and #2 on the standby list got us seats in row 35 on the side of a 787. United’s meal offerings are always a bit shocking. If United was planning a child’s birthday party, they would think an Ethiopian restaurant would be the perfect venue. Our options on this particular flight were chicken or vegetarian. Innocuous enough, but the vegetarian was a stir fry with peppers while the chicken dish was Indian curry.
Several hours into the flight we still weren’t sure if we should just stay in England when we got there, or continue to Mallorca. The forecast in England had improved somewhat after having previously sworn it off due to rain. Furthermore, connections out of Heathrow were complicated by the security worker strike, which rather inconveniently began today. As part of that, British Airways is not allowing anyone to purchase any new tickets (and by extension list as a standby) on any of their flights scheduled during the strike. As one might imagine, avoiding British Airways out of London Heathrow is not the easiest thing to do. It’s like trying to go in and out of Atlanta while trying to avoid flying Delta.
We landed at London’s Heathrow airport around 1130am. It then took us over an hour to get through passport control, which was hardly surprising because that’s just Heathrow being Heathrow. With a U.S. passport, we could use the automated E-Gates, which claimed to shorten the queue wait time to under ten minutes. Not true. Also . . .they were not working for probably 80% of the people trying to use them (including me at one point). I was shuffled over to another line of about 400 people whose passports didn’t work in the E-Gates. The line wasn’t moving at all, so I took that opportunity to simply slide back over and try a different E-Gate and managed to get through.
We then took a shuttle to the Enterprise rental car lot, where we were promptly shown our vehicle. Despite having recently upgraded to the left seat of an Embraer 175, I now found myself sitting right seat in a Vauxhall Corsa. After briefly getting lost in the Heathrow environs and accidentally driving through a taxi and bus rank section (nobody seemed to notice or mind), we round-a-bouted ourselves to the Stirrups Hotel near Windsor Castle. It was now about 3 pm.
After taking a 90 minute nap, we dragged ourselves to dinner at the Stirrups. It turned out to be a rather popular place even though one of the waiters kept commenting on how horrible the weather was. Nicole had a burger and I got a chicken and mushroom pie washed down with a Guinness. From there we plotted out the remainder of our week here in England. Nicole had watched The Policeman with Harry Styles on the plane while I was watching Bend it Like Beckham, so perhaps we were prepping ourselves for this environment. The rain is expected to stop tomorrow and Bricole will begin their English adventure.
passports & pepto bismol 