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The Great Trek
We had to wait in the hotel reception in London for an hour, several hours after the information said we could get our room. In the end I told them to give me a key or call a manager!
We went for a nice pub meal in a real pub; rough voiced smoking barmaid and all! Problem was they forgot my order so I had to wait!
Next morning we got to the airport no problem and to Chicago no problem. The pilot said that there was going to be snow in Chicago and that the early connecting flights would be fine but that the later ones may be delayed. Yep- we had a later one because we were told the papers for immigration would take a while.
Two signatures and fingerprints after approaching the desk it was all done!
So we went to our gate and settled into Chicago airport, watching the snow fall. At one stage James and I were watching a solitary de-icing truck struggle to spray orange and green all over a plane as we listened to a pilot standing near us explaining ten better ways of doing it and how the system they were using wouldn't work. When we got back Anne asked me to check that our gate hadn't been changed. That's when we discovered that our flight had been cancelled!
The line for the information desk was long, long, long. I lined up anyway; all the time hearing calls for standby passengers to Appleton. In the end Anne thought we should try to get on that flight. We were so pleased with our selves when they let us on; it didn't matter where our luggage was. It didn't matter that my computer and video camera bag had been pretty much thrown into the luggage compartment from the gate.
About an hour later I was still playing fairly happily with James when the fun started again. We were cancelled, we weren't cancelled, we had to get off and wait to be re-boarded when the weather improved. This is when James started getting upset. After a long wait to get to the front of the information line I was assured that the plane was going to fly and told that we couldn't get the push chair and computer bag back (we'd thought about just calling it a day and going to a hotel).
So we waited, and waited. We set a bed up for James on our coats. We waited. Then we were told we'd be boarding soon. Then we weren't. Then we waited. Then we were cancelled!
I got in another long (I mean long) line to try to get hotel vouchers. The woman in line next to me tried to ring hotels on her mobile as we waited. They were all full. Anne had tried to ring Kathy and Fritz several times during this, but they were waiting with no information at the final destination airport. She finally got hold of Fritz and they started out to come and get us. As we began to feel really rough we realised that it had been 24 hours since we heard the alarm clock after a poor night's sleep. It was about five a.m. when we finally got home.
I guess it could have been far worse. You may have heard about the plane that skidded straight off the runway and crashed into some cars, killing a young lad. That was at Midway airport in Chicago, not far from where we were stuck and on the same night.
Our luggage got in on Saturday; it was quite a relief to have clothes and toiletries etc.
Weather forecast for tomorrow morning predicts -1 degree Fahrenheit (feeling like -15 degrees Fahrenheit in the wind!) We did have six inches of snow on one day, and the worst is to come!
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