Tuesday 16 January 2007

We Make it to America (just).

Greetings!
So our journey has begun, and began it did at four o'clock in the morning on the 10th of January. First a flight to Heathrow, where we fought our way across to terminal 3, found the most pitiful, and only eating establishment in what must be the airport's worst terminal, hung around bored for a bit and then realised half an hour before boarding time, that we should have been in terminal 4. Raced across to T4, stood in a long queue full of people trying to skip it and made our way onto the flight for Washington.

What a fun flight we had. first of all, as we were all settling into our seats, pre-take off, a crazy lady further behind us, made her way up the entire compartment instructing everyone else, in no uncertain terms why they mustn't put their seat backs back or else we would all suffer the wrath. We could all be forgiven for thinking the nutter of the flight had made herself known but how wrong we were. About 5 hours into our flight, crazy lady number 2 comes to the fore. A lady of Somalian descent, we think, but now operating a hair braiding shop on Peach Street Atlanta, let loose a tyrade against the commander in chief, who she seemed to think we all knew personally. Apparently, we should all have known that her son was a marine, and what right did the US have for leading an assault against her personally. She had plenty to say, and wanted to make sure that everyone on the entire plane would listen to her. Sadly for her, her point seemed to be lost as the rest of us were far more interested in identifying the air marshalls who were no longer hidden amongst us, and the performance by the cabin crew as they instructed us to remain calm while we all had to sit down and buckle up. It was the best in-flight entertainment I can remember, comedy-thriller-slap-stick live action performance, great.

We arrived in Washington to transfer to our flight to Atlanta, where Nicola's sister, Sarah, and her husband Brennen were to pick us up, but thanks to United Airlines, now officially the worst carrier in the world, we were left stranded overnight, with no provisions of food, hotel or nuffink. Luckily for us resourceful chappies, we sorted ourselves out with both and successfully made it the following morning.

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