Oh wow, was this a flight fraught with danger and excitement!
You see, our flight from Heathrow was supposed to take us to Las Vegas via a short change in Newark, New York - but we hadn't realised that you are supposed to allow 90 minutes changeover between any flights. This is because you must clear customs at your first port of entry to the US, not at your final destination. I guess that kind of makes sense, although I am used to a much more sophisticated system whereby they just check your baggage fully through, and you clear customs at the final point. Anyway. We pointed out to the lovely gentleman (not) at Continental's desk at Heathrow that we only had 1 hour, and he told us we should've read the blurb and made a later connection. But lastminute.com sold us the ticket like that! Why do the airlines make available these tickets with these inadequate connection times if their own rules state that you must allow 90 minutes transfer time? Its ridiculous! But not as ridiculous as the security questions and checks at Heathrow before we even boarded the plane.
First of all, some burke comes up to us and tries to show us how to check in using the automated system. What, am I some sort of computer dimwit? Don't I know how to follow instructions on screen? Can't I read English? Clearly not, because he had to input everything for us - and the man had the typing speed of an elderly coffin-dodger snail. Couple this with the fact we were already running late because Agnieszka's tube had been delayed, and you can see I was champing at the bit to try and get on the computer myself and get through the stupid process quicker.
The stupid thing is, in order to check in you have to provide an address in the US. Big problem if you haven't pre-booked anything, but fortunately we had (one of the rare times we had done so). No problem, right? No - problem. Our address doesn't come up on the system (clearly if you're staying in Las Vegas they don't expect you to be staying in a youth hostel). But we type in the address, eventually the computer accepts it and we move on. Short of giving my bra size, time and date of last potty stop and all, the computer wanted to know everything about you. How ridiculous! Like they can really tell if you're a terrorist from all that...
Eventually we get through, and then its off for some last minute shopping before boarding the flight. That part of the journey was pretty uneventful, they had a couple of films but I can't really remember what they were, and I managed to have a little snooze.
So, we arrive in Newark and its 'all stations go' as we rush through the airport, picking up our baggage, scanning our fingerprints at customs, answer copious stupid questions about what we were doing in Syria (yes, the first thing the guy did was spot the Syrian visa in my passport and demand whether we had any family there, did I have something to bring in from there - like I would've kept it for a year anyway, right - that's how long ago I was last in Syria)... yada yada yada. They took Agnieszka off to some other dodgy queue, for no apparent reason - oh and we had to take our shoes off to go through the scanners even though she was wearing sandals - like you can conceal a bomb in sandals, right? But eventually we get through and we found our gate - with 15 mintues to spare.
We shouldn't have bothered rushing. They boarded us on time, but then the plane just sat there at the gate, for about 40 minutes - for no real reason. Then the captain informs us that we are number 25 in the take-off queue - so that takes another 40 minutes or so. By this point, I'm so tired I just nodd off in my seat, barely noticing when we finally took off - but briefly waking when we were in the air to hear the captain announce that we were returning to Newark. Why?
Turns out that there was a problem with the landing gear - it wouldn't retract or something - so we had to go back to Newark and change plans. This process took 2 hours or so, just sitting there in the airport, doing nothing - so by the time we finally left for Vegas, we were something like 3- 4 hours behind schedule. This meant that instead of arriving at 11.30pm, we arrived at 3.30am - and then had to figure out how to get to our hostel that no-one seemed to have ever heard of.
We eventually managed to get there via the airport hotel bus, but at a cost - $8 per person. Finally checked in and crashed...
1 comment:
Good words.
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