Saturday--Heathrow Homeward Bound

I'm not going to rehash all the gory details from our experience in Heathrow 2 weeks ago. The fact that we had to relive portions of it, was bad enough. I'd prefer not to put you folks through all of that again, so I'll highlight the good parts of our brief "visit" to the airport-that-will-never-be-forgotten.

Hmmm, the good parts....ok, I guess I'm done, we are finally home...end of blog....nope... I'm kidding...you didn't think you were going to get off that easy did you??? If I had to go through it....and you've stuck with me through this blog up until now, well then you can suffer through this one last Heathrow post. So here goes....

Thinking back, there may be a bit of important airline info I left out during my initial Heathrow post. Although I know for a fact (after having read numerous horror stories on numerous airline travel review websites) this may have contributed to some of our unfortunate situation, the airport itself deserves very low marks in several areas of operation. Then again, I may just be one of those spoiled Americans, and need to shut up and file it all away in my memory bank as an interesting, although painful, travel experience. When we initially arrived at our gate in Heathrow (you remember--the gate that didn't exist until the last possible moment) at the beginning of our vacation, we were told that although all our tickets, boarding passes, our reservations, and even the actual name on the side of the plane stated British Airlines....we'd actually been booked on an Iberia flight....what the ****????? (insert any dirty four letter word that comes to mind--I think, nope-I know, I actually said one out loud). We had done everything within our power to avoid this low cost, customer serviceless, horror story ridden, cheapo airlines and here we were flying on one of their flights. Thanks so much to BA for partnering with them and leaving us in the dark...literally. Pretty sneaky on their part, we might not have ever believed it, but on our return flight home, after we received our boarding passes, we were sent from the BA checkin counter to the Iberia kiosk (too cheap to even have a proper counter), to pay my additional bag fee. They were so antiquated, they pulled out one of those old fashioned credit card machines to run the metal presser over my card and imprint the receipt. Huh...they still use those things??? That of course was after the clerk went behind the screened partition for 5 minutes to look up in some ancient airline bible, how much to charge me for the extra bag??? I kid you not! Lesson learned, you get what you pay for...guess I need to do more research next time. Expedia, you SUCK! We will stick to booking air directly through the airlines...although that is no guarantee either. We are probably in trouble for 2011, but perhaps I should start researching now for our 2012 trip, guess my 9 months of daily surfing the travel sites, compiling 20 pages of travel notes into a 2 inch 3-ring binder, and posting questions on every travel message board known to man, just wasn't enough.

The one thing I can assure you of...we are never, ever, never, ever going to bring that much luggage again....oops, did I actually put that in writing??? Yes we love to dress up...yes we are both chronic over packers, yes we end up bringing home a few things we didn't wear (the shorts are still clean--who knew the temps would not be warm enough for us?), and yes, while trudging through the airport on this trip, we've both said out loud to each other...NEVER again. Well, we'll see how long that commitment to more economical packing lasts :) or maybe I'm misquoting us, I think we said, we'll just pay for all the extra luggage and forget about the carry-on bags, yup--that was it! Old habits die hard and we are just a couple of old travelers...what can I say?

Ok, back to the subject at hand, if I can even remember what that was...I do tend to go off on a rant now and then...who me?

Getting off the plane carrying our hand luggage, was our first hurdle...in the dark, drizzly night, down a long narrow, wet and steep set of stairs...onto the tarmac, up onto a bus with standing room only, we were eventually shuttled to the gate. The remainder of our evening at Heathrow, as expected, was long in only one respect...the mind-numbing wait to get through immigration. It took about 45 minutes to get through the lines..and we were the lucky ones. When we looked behind us at the streams of people still filing onto that massive room, we knew they would all be there until at least 1 or 2 am. Have I mentioned how the lines moved like molasses? We landed after 10 pm, and we were in a taxi, on the way to our hotel around 11. We were thankful the hotel was very close, and we didn't have to retrieve all of our luggage, so we only had our 4 carry-ons (1 each above the seat/1 each below).

Hotel check in, pick up a quick snack at the kiosk, then off to bed after setting the alarm for our 5 am wake up. The room was good, the mattress soft and we slept like babies.


Somehow, not quite the same and a very sad tradeoff :(

We arrived back at Heathrow in the early dawn, to once again drag ourselves through the maze of security (they hand searched ALL our carry on bags), do self serve check-in for our boarding passes (the line to counter check bags was horrific), exchange our pounds for dollars, grab some food to carry on, and make our way to the gate. Have you ever seen a traffic light configuration for entry into the gate area? It was a first for us...and had everyone in line scratching their heads. It went something like this: four glass doors in a square formation...one set leading to the walkway for passengers arriving, one set leading to the gate for those of us departing. However, neither of the groups could be in the same area at the same time. A long line formed behind us, as only a few were let through at a time. Apparently the folks getting off of their plane coming down the walkway, had priority and our "traffic" was shut down over and over. Since when do passengers arriving at an airport have time constraints that take precedence over folks getting onto a plane that is departing??? The glass doors (coded key pad to be punched each time the doors opened and closed) and very slow flow were strictly monitored by guards. It was quite prison like in it's configuration and to say it took an inordinate amount of time to move all of the hundreds of passengers into the gate area, and through the process, would be an understatement. Oh Heathrow....what am I going to do with you??? A true lesson in futility and a test of everyone's patience.

One last leg of our journey, and we'd be home...after a 8 hour flight that is..not really so bad actually. I love daytime flying...never any pressure for me to try to get any sleep. I watched 3 movies, ate A LOT...and got some writing done...all while Roger tried to watch the same 2 movies over and over...poor guy, he just kept falling asleep.


Carbs, carbs and more carbs...did I mention I picked up a chicken panini before we boarded..hey, it's a 8 hour flight...a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do--missed taking a pic of the cookie and pasta salad they delivered an hour before we landed...I also drank about a gallon of liquid...yikes!

We both continued to diligently take our No Jet Lag pills and hoped they worked as well as they did on the way overseas (happy to report-they did). We landed in Miami on time, sailed through immigration quickly (I love being an American on American soil), and picked up all (YES) our luggage before meeting our shuttle back to the Sofitel. The car was filled with our bags...and we hit the road for home. As we approached Ft. Lauderdale from Miami, Rog mentioned that he thought Oasis might be in port, so we took a slight detour to grab a quick peak of her at the dock...holy crap that's a huge ship...maybe someday.

Although I've done my very best at every point of this trip, I still can't truly describe how much we enjoyed our cruise and how very much it meant to us to renew our vows in such an incredible setting. It was a dream come true for both of us...a brief time in our lives we will never forget. Thank you all so much for tagging along, it was my pleasure to share our adventures with each and everyone of you.

Up next....guess you'll have to wait and see!