Home, Sweet Home | One Day at a Time

Continued from London Day 6.

Today is travel day back to Austin to see our kids. We had a noon flight, which due to travel times and having plenty of time to check in, we decided to wake up early at 7:30. It’s early for us since we never quite fully adjusted to jet lag.

Another beautiful day here in London. We’ve really lucked out with the weather here. Never really needed to use any of our rain gear. Just to think, had we been here a week earlier, our days would be ruined by super strong winds. And I think next week it’s supposed to rain much of the week. Nailed the weather just right this trip, super cool.

Short walk to the tube station right by our hotel, then it’s an hour subway ride to the airport.

Shen Yun is EVERYWHERE.

Sunday morning, no crowds yet!

London is definitely not that ADA friendly. Look at the platform step up needed to get off at some of the stations.

It’s time to get home. Great time in London, and now missing our kids.

The mall, as I call it.

Oh…that’s a lot of people in line waiting to check in. We’ll need to check in with someone since we need to get our passport checked even though we’ve got only carry-on.

It turns out, the longest line is for all the flights to America, so the line we are in. Doh. We’ve got about 2.5 hours to get through this line and get through security and get to our gate. We’ve got time, but many of the others in line have much earlier flights and may miss their flights.

At one point, airport personnel came by and pulled others to a different and shorter line if they met certain criteria. One of it was having a boarding pass. I have one via email, but RL didn’t have one even though I requested one. So I managed to quickly use my phone to get another boarding pass sent to our email.

Then we were moved to a different line that was about half the length. It turns out the long lines today were due to all the cancelled and delayed flights yesterday. So all the people who were stuck in London yesterday are also trying to fly out of here again. And apparently, the British Airways IT issue they were having was due to the strong winds last week that knocked out one of their data centers.

As we waited in the new line, we saw a couple of people getting into an altercation at our old longer line. I think some guy tried to cut in line because he was running late for his flight, and at one point I thought punches were getting thrown. I think eventually the guy who was causing all the trouble either got moved to the back of the line or out of the airport.

Finally able to check in and made it through security, which was a pain. They are much more strict about having liquids all in one single clear bag here than in US. I’d say most of the travelers, us included, got pulled out to get checked one on one for all the fluids in their bags. They should just have better signage at the security line so people can actually know what to take out to be scanned separately.

The mall that is terminal 5. I see that they still have the same policy of not posting gate numbers for flights until the last possible moment so all travels are forced to wander around and shop since you can’t just sit at your gate.

Tried to get into a lounge to get some drinks and food, but they were also at capacity due to all the extra travelers from all the cancelled flights yesterday. We just visited a convenience store, grabbed some to go food, and then saw that our gate had been assigned.

The gate is so far away we’ll need to take an underground train to get there.

Fancy.

Finally at our gate. Of course, 5min after we rushed all the way here and sat down, they announced that our flight will be delayed about 45min due to some maintenance issue. Sigh.