Our flight from LAX to Heathrow left Friday at 6:30 pm PST. Or it was supposed to. We sat on the tarmac for about 45 minutes, which in the grand scheme of how travel worked was infinitesimal. But after a
relatively uneventful flight of ten and a half hours, we landed at 2pm GMT Saturday.
At Manchester.
This would be because Heathrow was closed due to severe snow and inclement weather. As was Gatwick.
After sitting for four hours on the tarmac (and the Virgin crew was wonderful, there were snacks and they played Toy Story 3) they managed to get buses to take us (all 306 passenger s + 12 crew) down to Heathrow. And we all got five pound vouchers for the convenience store outside customs/immigration, so after buying something for dinner and using the facilities, we hopped onto a coach.
Where we proceeded to stay for nine and a half hours, as the usually three-hour journey was through roads that had a heavy load of snow such that one section of the M40 had three jackknifed lorries and at least one multi-car pileup.
Thank goodness for
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toothycat's early Christmas presents for Wonderful Husband (a DS vidgame) and myself (two books, the one of which I read on the coach being CryoBurn, which, argh! the ending
killed me, but more about that later).
We arrived at Heathrow at 4am Sunday where my wonderful inlaws had been waiting for us for six hours (the bus made one stop about an hour into the drive, when we had called them and told them the two-more-hours ETA the driver had given us; no one on board had a cellphone for us to later update them), and finally home in Eastleigh at 5:30am Sunday morning, where we promptly all crawled into bed and fell unconscious.
Given the thousands of stranded travelers, hundreds of whom we saw sleeping inside the terminal at Heathrow, covered with tinfoil blankets, we feel very lucky, and we're very pleased with Virgin's services.
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