The outbound flight was scheduled to depart BOS at 8:20. At around 4pm the phone rang "may I speak to Helen Rose or Christopher Davis?" "this is Helen Rose" "this is Delta International Reservations Desk" "oh no what happened?"
Turns out the flight was late leaving Gatwick, so the departure time from Boston was pushed back to 9:30pm. That was fine by me, I had a ton of work to do! We were at the airport for 7pm. The checkin line was busy but moved well (Virgin also was very efficient in that they had a ticket agent standing halfway back in the line and checking passports -- that way any documentation missing would be found sooner rather than later, and people would have their travelling documentation out and ready for ticket agent when they got to the front). My husband got his landing card (he's an evil furriner, while I am a British Subject) -- funny story there, we made a mistake filling out the landing card so went back for another one about an hour and a half later -- by that point they'd only given out ONE other card! The flight was obviously predominantly British Subjects :-). Then we killed a bit of time watching the ball sculptures in Terminal C (the flight leaves from Terminal B, but it's an easy walk to Terminal C).
We went into the gate (the gate that the VS flight leaves from is an enclosed area with a seperate security perimeter. Only passengers are permitted in.) at around 8:15pm ... there weren't many seats near the actual entrance to the jetway -- we looked around the room and saw a bunch of seats off in the corner ... turns out they were by the window and we had a BEAUTIFUL head on view of Scarlet Lady.
The transatlantic flight was very nice. My husband and I were sitting in the window-and-middle of one of the sections of 3, with someone else sitting on the aisle. After takeoff (we pushed back ontime at 9:30), the person in the aisle seat moved over to an empty seat (there were 3 spare seats across the aisle, in the section of 4, so he took one of them, leaving my husband and I with 2 seats between us). They served drinks pretty quickly -- the cans were very cute, just 150ml (typical soda cans in the US are 355ml). I settled down to snatch some sleep while they were puttering about before dinner. I got about an hour, then they rattled down the aisle with the dinner trolley. My husband knew what I wanted (I had told him :-) ... I was considering compromising not eating with more sleep. I sat up and ate some of the crackers from the meal and discovered how hungry I was! The meal was peppered chicken with potatoes au gratin. Yum! My husband and I both slept after "dinner". "breakfast" was cereal and a muffin along with orange juice.
The seatback video screens were COOL! 6 channels, 2 of which show movies, of the remaining four, 1 is comedy, 1 is music, 1 is kids, and 1 is "features" (they had some news specials on). The movie channels had 3 movies on each of them, one running after another.
We arrived into Gatwick on time at 7:50. I couldn't believe how *brown* England looked! Usually, on any approach to Gatwick, the ground below is all green ... I knew England was in the midst of a drought but I didn't realize how severe it was. We landed and it took a while for people to deplane (people get off of a 757 much quicker than a 747 :-). My husband and I, energized from our 2 hours of sleeping, had a wonderful brisk walk from the gate to the people mover (we'd come in at the satellite terminal of Gatwick's South Terminal). Some people who had obviously not been to Gatwick before (or perhaps they were just in a sleep-deprived state) walked around the round satellite terminal a couple of times before catching on :-)
Immigration was quick for me (hah!) and a little more involved for my husband ("what are you doing here, who are you staying with, and you KNOW you're not supposed to work"). By the time he was done convincing them he wasn't a threat ("I'm staying with my wife's Grandmother." "your wife is British then? "yes" "well that's alright then!" *stamp passport), our flight had come up on the customs monitor and we went upstairs to claim our bags. Well, OK, *bag*. The flight was packed, and everyone had a lot of luggage, so a few minutes after the luggage appearing on the belt, they started putting luggage on the next belt as well. My husband covered one and I covered the other. He found the luggage first (that meant he got to carry [or at least drag :-] it). We went through customs. There wasn't even an agent to make sure people weren't shifty looking!
We then proceeded to the coach station to wait for the coach to Coventry. We missed the 8:50 so we had to wait for the 10:20 -- that gave us just enough time to get some money from an ATM, hit one of the little convenience stores (with convenience store prices. 70p for a 200ml bottle of ribena! outrageous! the same bottle in Tesco's near my Gran's was 40p!) for drinks, and get a map (we were going to pick up a rental car two days after we arrived. We had not wanted to have our first opposite-side-drive experience to be in a jet-lag fog).
[Not much point discussing what *happened* on the trip, since it's not really relevant to air travel, except possible the side trip we took to the RAF Museum at Cosford. We got some great pictures!]
We had planned to leave 5 Sept (Tuesday), so we got up early, got packed, etc. I rang Delta at 8am to make sure the flight was leaving on time ... sure enough, it was. Just as a hunch, I reconfirmed. "What? You're not scheduled to leave today. You're scheduled to leave TOMORROW!".
aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
This may have not been so bad, but our boss had said to us "you HAVE to be in the office on Wednesday. No ifs ands or buts about it". So there was no alternative. We were going standby.
We drove the rental car down to Gatwick (we had reserved a Vauxhall Astra, but when we went to pick up the car, they were out of Astras, and gave us a Vauxhall Cavalier at an Astra rate). The Cavalier we had had a 2.0L engine. We were very glad, because we must have done 90 most of the way down the M40 (we went A46 to M40 to M25 to M23). And people were passing us! It was insane! Traffic slowed down quite a bit once we got onto the M25, of course ("world's largest car park"). But we picked up the pace again after we got onto the M23. Door to door time, Coventry to Gatwick, around 2.25 hours. I don't think I could do that again if I *tried*!
Our flight was not scheduled to leave until 3pm. We went straight to the Delta ticket desk at the South Terminal (they have one lone ticket agent who shares a desk with Virgin). All I can say about this woman was that she was wonderful! She told us about our options, about what Delta would and could not do for us. She did what she could, but she did not hold back any information from us.
The way the Delta/Virgin code share deal works is that Delta prepurchases a certain number of seats from Virgin and then has to sell those themselves. If Delta's allocation is full, then it's just like if they had their own 747 that went off full -- they couldn't put anyone else on it. Not even if Virgin had spare seats. So we had to hope that somebody no-showed for the flight (when we arrived, the flight was spot-on full. No extra people [apart from ourselves], no spare seats). The DL agent told us she had two other DL aircraft leaving for the states, one at 1:30 to Cincinnati, and one at 3:00 to Atlanta. Both of them had connecting options to Boston. But both of those flights left from a different terminal! And the Cincinnati flight was full ... as it turned out, Atlanta would have been full too!
The agent told us to come back at 2:00. So at 2:00 we came back (after a nice visit to the Buchair shop at the Gatwick Spectators Terrace, of course) -- she said that there were 4 noshows at that point, 2 in upper class and 2 in economy class. She then told us that until the flight closed (45 minutes before departure time), if they showed up, they got the seats, and we'd be screwed. She jokingly suggested that if we saw anyone coming from the door and rushing towards the desk we should trip them to delay them! 2:15 came and the nice agent had pre-typed in the information (the computer wouldn't accept it until the flight was closed, but she had typed out a looooooong line which she would press enter on once she would hear the flight had closed). 2:20 came and just 2 seats remained! The upper class seats! No luck on us getting them, unfortunately ... she bumped two people from premium economy to upper, and two people from economy to premium economy. She went and hauled the VS supervisor out to OK us (apparently VS's term for a standby is a "have-a-go" :-) ... it was 2:30 by the time we had boarding passes. We had these great big things "late passenger boarding card". She gave us great directions, saying to go straight to the front of the passport line and just wave those cards because that would get us by everyone.
We had a luggage cart with our two suitcases (since we were "have-a-goes", it was too late for us to counter-check our luggage, we'd have to do it at the gate) and 3 carryons (shhh, yes, we took 3 carryons on board) ... but my husband picked up 2 of the carryons because they were liable to fall off. Once thanking the agent profusely, we took off for the terminal. We *ran*! I pushed past all of these people with this huge cart with 100lbs of baggage (and thus had a ton of inertia). We had to put our suitcases through the regular x-ray machine (a real trick, with a 28" hardsided case), and then haul it off on the other end, something I'm sure I *couldn't* have done without alot of adrenaline (it's a very bulky suitcase and awkward to handle when it weighs 70lbs). We then went through passport control and out to the international departures lounge. More running (I think everyone was staring at us! We made such a RUCKUS pushing that cart at a dead run across one of those tile-type floors), down a ramp (loads of fun with one of those carts!), and over to the people mover.
Off the people mover, into the satellite terminal, the last people in the gate area were boarding our plane. VS had found us two seats together! So we took the boarding cards and checked our luggage at the gate. We then went back to row 61 (4 rows from the back) and flopped down.
The flight back? I don't remember a whole lot .... I was sort of destressing from the experience in getting on the plane. That we almost didn't make it. The food was good again :-) I remember that much :-)
I will be writing a letter to DL to complement the ticket agent. She went above and beyond the call of duty (suggesting we trip people? :-) to help us get on our flight.
I used to curse Gatwick because I had some really bad experiences there (plus its another 30-35 miles further away than Heathrow from Coventry), but I can actually say "I had a nice Gatwick experience". Does this mean I'll start putting airport codes in my .signature now? :-) I can just see it:
I like: BOS, LHR, LGW, SLC, ATL, SEA, BHX I don't like: DFW, ORD, BRU
nah, maybe not :-)
--H