England Trip – Day 9

Aside from nearly missing my flight, not much interesting happened here. I arrived at Gatwick a bit later than I had hoped, about 1 hour and 45 minutes before my flight. The line to check in at US Airways was quite long, but I met a guy in the line who was on the same flight and we chatted while we waited for about 45 minutes to check in (time until flight leaves – 1 hour). The real problem occurred in security. I have a proclivity for picking the wrong lines. I some how managed to get in line behind a family – mother, daughter, and two sons – that appeared to have no idea how to travel through security. The mother took about 5 minutes to go through on her own; she had to remove more and more jewelry each time she walked through the metal detector. The sons – both teenagers – had to do the same thing. One son tried to carry an iPod through the metal detector! Then the daughter, not learning from her mother, had to go through multiple times as well, each time removing more jewelry. Arghh!! By the time I made it through security I had less than 30 minutes before my flight was to leave. I checked the departures list and next to my flight it said “flight closing”. To add to my anxiety, there were no clearly visible signs indicating which terminals were where. I finally found a sign and, luckily, my terminal wasn’t too far away, but I ended up running to it anyway (yep, I was one of those crazy people running through the airport). I was one of the last people on the flight, but I made it.

The flight was relatively uneventful. I finished the book I took with me then had time to watch two movies: State of Play and Pelham 123. Customs in Charlotte took forever, but my final flight back to Tampa was uneventful and I was finally reunited with Debi and Toren, both of whom I had missed terribly while I was away.

While my homecoming was exciting, what awaited was less so – basically a 72 hour marathon grading session (interrupted by a dryer malfunction). But I made it. England trip log complete.