Right now we should be 3hrs into our hideous 24hr trip home. But we're not! ...
Back to the beginning, today was our last day in England (so we thought) and Mitch made the most of the sunny morning by sleeping in until 10am. So we did too.
Leisurely day of packing every bag we own up to the brim (overestimated on the nappy requirements so we have one bag dedicated to them alone, plus we scored the car seat from the Manns to bring home).
Bernie got home at 6pm and by 6.15pm we were on the road, heading west for heathrow for our 10.30pm flight.
Here's where the fun starts. It was pouring with rain, they found cracks in the overpass of the freeway we needed so it's been closed all week, one tube line was down due to a signal failure, and in true british form pedestrians take priority over cars. All this meant absolute chaos on the roads and it took us 3hrs to go 1.5hrs.
Thankfully we left with plenty of time (again, so we thought) and arrived at the departures terminal with a whole 20mins to spare. Sweet. Wrong!
It was just as chaotic inside. After 10mins waiting in a queue (and after having already checked that we were in the right place) I really started to panic when we had only 10mins left until check in closed.
So I bailed up a lady, she got cracking on her computer and then she started to panic. We had seats but she couldn't assign them !?!
Thankfully, she could vouch for us being there pre-9.30 or this day would be ending with us having to buy 2 one-way flights home. Have kind of ruined the suspense now ...
But back to the drama - so it turns out they sold 309 tickets for a plane with 308 seats. So there was 1 seat left for the 3 of us, who surprisingly were the last to check in (how 307 other people managed to get through london is still baffling us). We also later found out that they would have put us in Upper Class, if they'd had any seats left. Bummer :(
So since it was Virgin's fault, they re-booked us on tomorrow night's flight, gave us $$ compensation (for which we had to exchange our voucher tonight at travelex or we wouldn't get the money, and they were about to close - so raced upstairs for that, prob with paperwork, back downstairs and dragged the guy back up), organised a bus transfer to the hotel (waited 25mins in waiting area, then another 10mins on bus for actual driver), checked-in to hotel (lugged oversized bags down longest hotel corridor we've ever been in, seriously it must be about 100m, then missed main room service menu by 5mins so ordered whatever was left over and 2 beers but Mitch almost asleep and they rang back and woke him up, no heinekins - "give us whatever"), ate on the floor next to the door so as not to wake Mitch up again then turned on air con (not working, Ganey is now using a wet washer to fan himself down!)
I really don't think I can do justice to how farcical the last 5hrs have been. And worst of all, it turns our 24hr trip home into 48hrs.
One thing I can say is that Mitch was brilliant throughout all of this. He loved weaving his way through the queue ropes when everybody had left (seems those flights weren't overbooked!) and was a huge hit with the Virgin staff who were helping us out. In fact, we have a play date for 8pm tomorrow night at the supervisor's counter.
Shame his award-winning smile and party tricks (today he started clapping his hands) couldn't get us a seat in the cockpit...