Once we reached the terminal, we realized that ours was not the only flight that had just been canceled. Perhaps as many as ten—or more—flights had been canceled at the exact same time. That meant that thousands of passengers were having to go back through immigration, all at the same time, and everyone was frantically trying to find a place to stay for the night. By the time we got off the plane, all of the hotels anywhere even close to the airport had been filled. British Airways gave us a voucher for a hotel on the opposite end of London and a map of the Tube, and then we got in line for immigration.

 

At that point, it was about 8:30 PM. Thankfully, everyone in line was amazingly good-natured and helpful to everyone around them, in any way they could be. We had made the ill-considered decision to bring my cell phone only and not to buy a SIM card for it when we arrived, nor to arrange for an overseas calling plan. We figured we would be with Cathy and Rob the whole time and besides, Richard needed a real vacation, one where he wouldn’t be tempted to check in with work all the time. I didn’t bring my charger because I figured I wouldn’t have the correct adaptor (which didn’t turn out to be the case; Cathy has every adaptor known to mankind). I had left the cell phone switched off the entire time, but even so, the battery had slowly been losing charge. We decided to call Cathy and Rob, but then it occurred to me, with great dismay, that not only did we not have their number programmed in to my phone, I had also left my physical address book at home in the interests of having as much room in my handbag as possible for the trip.

 

Nevertheless, we turned on the phone to see we might be able to accomplish and found out that AT&T, rather unnervingly, seemed to know that I was overseas and had posted a message on my welcome screen telling me that I could make calls for $1.50 a minute. This was actually quite welcome news, so I called my brother to see if he could give me Cathy and Rob’s phone number, which he did. But the problem was, we couldn’t figure out how many digits to dial now that we were in the UK. Efforts we made to leave off or include various prefixes didn’t work. So we called my cousin who had spent several months in England and, we knew, spent some time with Cathy and Rob. He was unable to remember which digits he had used to call them in-country, so we made arrangements for him to call them and for them to call or text us.

 

Finally, someone in line was able to help us figure out the right number of digits, so we called Cathy’s cell phone just as our cousin Jim was calling them on their landline. They tried booking us a room in the hotel we had stayed at the night before, but it was full. A nice woman in front of us in line lent us her Marriott card that had a number of nearby hotels’ numbers listed, but again, they were all full. And Cathy and Rob were now completely snowed in. We were also trying, repeatedly, to call the number British Airways had given us for rebooking, neglecting to tell us that the number wouldn’t be any good until the next morning. A young woman behind us in line asked if she could borrow our cell phone and put her SIM in so that she could call her parents, and we obliged. She made several tries but was unable to make it work. I noticed, at this point, that the battery on the phone was starting to get very low.

 

So we turned off the phone and resigned ourselves to spending the night on the east end of London as we crept through the massive, snaking line in immigration. That took two-and-a-half hours. It was eleven o’clock by the time we got out. Then we headed to baggage claim to get our checked luggage where more chaos awaited. All the luggage from all the flights that had been canceled had been taken off the carrousels and tossed into big, jumbled-up piles. And unfortunately, our luggage was not all that distinctive. Two carrousels had been designated for our flights’ luggage, so I took one carrousel and Richard took another. This turned out to be a bad plan as we got separated in the pandemonium and had a hard time finding each other again (you can perhaps imagine: thousands of people from all over the world in a frenzy, searching for their bags in a sea of luggage). Richard and I both wandered around for an hour trying to find our bags (and then each other when we were turning up empty-handed), when an announcement came on over the PA system that no more luggage was going to be delivered to the area. The carrousels ground to a halt. Furthermore, the police were closing the baggage claim area, and anyone who hadn’t found their bag was to fill out and submit a lost luggage claim form. Our luggage, they said, would be delivered to our destination. Eventually. Hopefully.

 

Well, this was not good news for a couple of reasons. For one thing, our “destination” was San Francisco, a four-hour drive from our eventual destination. For another thing, I had packed all our chocolate and breakables in our carry-on, and the vast, vast majority of our clothes and sundries were in our checked bags. Not to mention the concern that we might not ever see those bags again.

 

By now it was close to midnight. I filled out the forms and Richard got in line to submit them. I watched the painstaking process of submitting the claim and wondered how long that was going to take. And of course, there were hundreds of people in line, and we were by no means near the head of the line. I figured as long as Richard was going to be stuck in line, I might as well keep looking through the luggage while he waited. So I walked over to one of the carrousels that had been designated for our flight and just as I got there, it came to life. Two minutes later, our bags came riding around, looking, in my joy to have found them, like cute little cetaceans. I grabbed them and began shouting for Richard as I hauled them over in his direction. He heard me, spotted me, and joined me with our two other bags. I thought we should probably try to sprint over to the Underground and see if we could catch a train to our hotel. But Richard’s wisdom prevailed.

 

For one thing, he pointed out, we would have to make a transfer. The Tube was getting ready to shut down and we sure as hell didn’t want to get stranded halfway to our destination in a part of London we didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure that we wanted to walk from the Tube to our hotel after midnight in a part of London we didn’t know. Both good points. Not to mention the fact that we were both very tired, the ride was bound to take at least an hour, and Richard had fallen on the ice a couple of weeks before we left home and injured his shoulder. Now that we had four bags (one we purchased to haul our presents home in), it wasn’t going to be that easy to navigate the Underground.

 

I switched on our phone to see if Cathy had sent us any messages, and I saw that she had sent a text suggesting we get a taxi, even though it would be pricey. By now, the Tube had closed and we didn’t have a choice. We went outside, into the freezing cold, and found another ridiculously long line for cabs. So we got in line and heard horror story after horror story from other people standing in line around us: One man’s wife had somehow lost her purse while going through security and they weren’t going to have any keys to get into their car once they got home. A guy from Greece had been traveling from Istanbul to school here in England, been unable to land at Heathrow and so was bussed here. All his warm clothes were in his checked luggage, which he didn’t have, so the poor kid was standing in line with no hat and no gloves, his hands bright red from the cold. Another guy spoke of being stranded on the tarmac for five hours, like we had been, and that he had two children and there had been no food at all. I thought, guiltily once again, to the tasty tea and Scottish lobster I had eaten while waiting. At the time, I had ended up uncomfortably full, but I realized now, hours later, how grateful I was for those two meals. I would have been absolutely starving right now, which would have added to the fatigue of standing for hours and hours and waiting outside in the cold.

 

The cute couple who had befriended us at the gate came by and joked about sharing a cab; if we had only been staying at the same hotel, it would have been perfect, as we found out by asking around while in line that the cab fare was going to be around $130.  But they weren’t, unfortunately. We waited in queue for about two hours, the cold gradually eating its way from the frozen concrete through the soles of my boots until my feet felt like mini-icebergs and Richard and I had both begun to shiver uncontrollably. If we had been walking, it would have been one thing, but standing in the cold was something else again. Finally, we got a cab, thankful that we had had the presence of mind to get some extra pounds from a cash machine before getting in the taxi line.

 

The eastern European cab driver was extremely kind and cranked up the heat for us while he drove. When we got to the hotel, he pointed out the nearby Tube station that we could take the next morning. We shuffled inside, feeling like zombies, and stumbled up to the desk where a nice African gentleman checked us into our room. As we turned away with our keys in our hands, Richard let out a weary sigh, and the desk clerk said, in a beautiful, lilting accent, “It will be all right.” It’s amazing how much such a simple kindness can mean in circumstances like these.

 

We took the elevator to our room, which was small but clean and bed-bug-free, thank God. In fact, the spare, techno-European decor looked like it was expressly designed to discourage bed bugs. By now, it was about 3 AM. We brushed our teeth and collapsed into bed where we slept four hours. It was difficult to sleep in, knowing that we hadn’t rebooked our flight yet and there were hundreds if not thousands of people like us who needed to rebook their journey. We tried the phone number we were given but couldn’t get through. We then tried to get online on one of the hotel’s computers, but the BA website was down because of so much traffic.

 

A breakfast was included in our voucher, so we ate a good breakfast of sausage and eggs and yogurt and fruit, then gathered our bags and went to the Tube to head out to Heathrow, the only way we could figure to get rebooked. A helpful station master saw us poring over the Underground map and gave us the best connection for getting to our terminal that wouldn’t involve taking stairs in order to make our transfer, and we got on the next train, wincing as we were immediately surrounded by a number of coughing passengers.

 

Waiting at our transfer station, we fell into conversation with a friendly retired couple from Vancouver, who had had their flight canceled yesterday as well. They had family in the London area, so that’s where they had stayed the night before. But, they joked, they had already stayed their welcome; a return engagement wasn’t greeted with the same wild joy as their first arrival.

 

When we got to the terminal, we spotted the line of passengers trying to rebook their coach seats. Probably a thousand people or more. But we still had our business class boarding passes. Whatever angel had upgraded us the first place was heaped with additional thanks as we were able to go to a line that had about thirty people in it. There, several representatives prowled the line, trying to book anyone on a flight that day that had room. Finally one of the reps made it to us, but today’s flight was full. So was Friday’s. And Saturday’s! We were able to get on Sunday’s flight. And wouldn’t you know it, a new storm was predicted to move in on Sunday.

 

Nevertheless, we took it. Richard had had the foresight to book a room at the Heathrow Marriott before we left our London hotel in case we weren’t able to get out today (the battery was so low on my cell phone at this point that we were saving it for dire emergencies), so we trudged over to the shuttle stop and headed back to the hotel where we had stayed only two nights ago, but which felt like two months ago. When we checked in there, we were lucky in that there was a room ready for us to occupy. “We heard about Heathrow last night from guests who stayed here,” said the French desk clerk. “They said it was like a fight cage!”

 

Well, it was crazy, that was for sure.

 

Many of the hotel staff recognized us from our previous stay and welcomed us back. The concierge was determined that we do something fun while we were stuck and suggested we check out nearby Windsor. “The queen’s in residence right now,” he told us, to further entice us. We stashed our bags in our room, went to the bar, ate some lunch and downed a pint, then went back to our rooms and took a good, long nap.

 

After that, we had two more days to fill. Cathy and Rob were snowed in, so we wouldn’t be able to see them again. And we weren’t all that keen to go into London in the crappy weather. We weren’t really feeling, somehow, that we were on extra vacation. But the next day we did decide to take the advice of the concierge and we took the bus to Windsor, where we stocked up on novels at Waterstone’s, replenished a few dwindling toiletries, and had a fantastic lunch at The Carpenter’s Arms, established in 1515. The pub had blazing fireplaces on both ends and specialized in British pies. I ordered the turkey Stilton port pie (made with dark meat from a real turkey, yum!), Richard got the wild mushroom pie, and we both washed our meals down with a delicious British ale on tap. So Richard got his pub lunch after all. And made friends with the Polish bartender, too, as you can see above!

 

 

The next day we weren’t really able to relax, even when we woke up and it appeared that the storm had stalled, even when we saw that our flight was scheduled to leave on time, even when we went through the extra security at the gate, which was now taking place an hour-and-a-half before boarding so that everyone was on the plane by our scheduled departure time—not even when the pilot came onto the sound system and said that we should be leaving on time. A half-hour passed after our scheduled departure time, and Richard and I were starting to feel increasingly nervous when the pilot came back on and said that a passenger who had checked a bag hadn’t boarded the plane; so they were locating the bag and taking it off the aircraft. Richard and I exchanged glances: Who checks a bag and forgets to get on their flight?

 

We were having a hard time coming up with a benign scenario.  

 

At any rate, finally our plane was taxiing to the runway, finally it was racing down the tarmac and finally, we were airborne! Ahhhh! We made it! We were on our way home, which had never sounded so good.

 

“But you know, twenty hours of hell out of three weeks of heaven isn’t so bad,” Richard mused, once we were in the air and sipping on a Kir Royale.

 

I was entirely inclined to agree.