Most Recent Posts

Related Links

Need a Website?

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Preparations for trip to England

Just a few days to go! We leave on Monday, May 5th, flying out of the tiny but very, very likable Chattanooga airport. We couldn't face driving two and a half hours to Atlanta again; that airport is big and sprawling, and arrivals (ie, when we return home) have to collect their baggage not once but TWICE — as if an eight hour flight in economy, plus the long wait to get through customs and the FIRST baggage claim isn't enough. Chattanooga airport is for domestic flights only though, so we have to make a connection — in our case in Chicago — but somehow the idea of a quick 30 minute drive to a nice, friendly local airport, then a short flight to Chicago and then on to London Heathrow, somehow outweighs the prospect of going anywhere near Atlanta for a direct flight to Gatwick.

Ever since I started flying to Georgia, way back in 1996, I've flown direct from Gatwick to Atlanta. And ever since I've been living here, every trip back to old Blighty has been direct from Atlanta to Gatwick. So this connection via Chicago is a first. Last year my parents made a connection in South Carolina, and it worked out well — and of course at the end of the long flight there's just a short hop in the car to our house, instead of getting snarled up in rush-hour traffic on the interstate around Atlanta, and then having to cross over a mountain to get home. Two and a half additional hours on the road, after a long flight, is not much to look forward to! So my parents were happy bunnies with their last flight over here. It's just a shame that their flight home was a complete nightmare; they got to Charlotte and the connection flight home was cancelled! The online help desk wasn't very helpful. Overall it was a bad experience for them, and they ended up staying the night in the baggage area — at their age! The next morning they flew back to Chattanooga, exhausted, and stayed an extra couple of days at our house while I made some phone calls to get some more convenient flights sorted out for them. Hence why we're not flying US Airways; we're flying United instead. Fingers crossed.

In the news lately there have been stories about American Airlines in Texas cancelling all flights to run tests on their planes. And meanwhile, at London Heathrow, Terminal 5 opened just a few weeks and was a complete disaster, with staff running around like headless chickens and everything going wrong. I heard stories of baggage weighing too much for the baggage machines, which caused the machines to stop dead — so handlers simply removed bags to get it going again, meaning that many bags never arrived in the right part of the airport. I even heard that there were so many bags left behind that they were all dumped on a plane to Spain so that Spanish staff could sort them out. There's some logic there somewhere, but I can't find it.

Luckily we're flying United, not American, and we're arriving at Terminal 3, not the dreaded Terminal 5. Still, anywhere in Heathrow is considered bad, being the busiest international airport in the world... But, in my old office job, when I used to gallivant about the country visiting thirty-odd small regional offices, I used to fly domestic flights out of Terminal 1 to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and even Manchester on a regular basis, and I can't say it was that bad — certainly no worse than Atlanta. I guess we'll find out!

This will be our second flight with Lily. The first time she was barely walking, and she slept for five hours. Bliss. This time she's nearly four and doesn't have a great deal of patience. But, she enjoys TV, so as long as the little TV on the back of the seat is working, we should be okay.

See how optimistic I am? Nothing can possibly go wrong! *grimace*

I'm not sure when I'll be able to post here again, but will try to cobble something together during our stay in England. If nothing else, I plan to take photos at Enid Blyton Day and will upload them as soon as possible. Unfortunately, after the Day is over, I'm going from Twyford straight to a castle in the Cotswolds, so won't be able to upload them for a week because we won't have a computer!

This post has 8 comments