Heathrow Airport Terminal 5, A-Gates

Date: December 16 & 17, 2010

Drink: Venti Quad Vanilla Latte, both times

Food: brie and cranberry sandwich on the 17^th (we needed breakfast, after all)

Travelling in winter sucks. And travelling through Heathrow Airport in winter sucks even more. I am sure they have their reasons, but why they need to cancel all flights on a certain runway where there’s no snow on the runway is beyond me. But that’s what they did.

We were so excited, because firstly neither of us had ever been to Germany, and secondly we got to the airport with enough time to relax, check out the Sony store, I could look for a hat, and we could stop by our favorite haunt – Starbucks! After all, we were landing in Berlin at 11 at night, then we’d have to drive to Leipzig and we’d probably get there around 2 in the morning… let’s just say a coffee was a much-needed jumpstart to the long night ahead of us.

Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 (sorry it's so dark, it was at night)

We got in and ordered our coffee. Then we found a place to sit while we waited for our gate to be assigned. And waited. And waited. At last I looked up at the monitor and saw, posted next to our flight, “Enquire at Counter”. I told Simeon, but he had to stand there and stare in a confused state for a few minutes. Then the flights before and after ours, one by one, said “Enquire at Counter” as well. The customer service counter was suddenly getting inundated with people, so Simeon made a run for it. While he was standing in line, suddenly it said next to our flight, “Cancelled Go to Gate 20”. Cancelled! Simeon was in the great mass of people at the customer service counter, where I knew not, so I somehow collected both of our carry-ons, both of our laptops, and our latte, and jostled my way through the crowd to Simeon. I told what the sign said, and we followed the mass exodus of disgruntled travelers to Gate 20, where there was yet another huge crowd waiting for who knew what. We had to be taken out of the airport and led back to the check-in counter to be rebooked. Hundreds of us. Dare I say? Thousands of us. Simeon and I tag-teamed it. Luckily, we were rebooked for a flight out of London at 7:55 to Hamburg the next morning. British Airways would comp our hotel, so we loaded onto a bus and got to the hotel, where we were also comped a pizza. Egh. Good enough.

Early the next morning we were back at the airport. We checked in, along with hundreds of other people, yet because our flight was before 8:00 (7:55, in fact), we were taken to the front of the line and expedited through. We once again had enough time to go to Starbucks and order a coffee and a brie and cranberry sandwich, which we toasted. The brie and cranberry sandwich, when warmed up, is a very good breakfast, I’d like to add. Anyway, we boarded our flight and took off pretty much on time, which was massively lucky as I later found out. Because one of the American couples who had flown through Heathrow and whose flight was scheduled to depart at 4:00 that same day told us that every flight after 8:00 that morning was cancelled. And our flight took off at 7:55…. Oh my God, somebody loves us!