London II

When we returned to London near the end of our journey we were both exhausted and not in the mood for any more adventures. But we were delighted to reunite with my old friend from graduate school, Nandita Batra. She was in London for a month. Nandita is an English professor at the University of Mayaguez in Puerto Rico. Here we are in a pub near our hotel, the Sidney.


And that was more or less the end of our adventure. Well, not quite. The next day would turn out to be probably the worst travel day we've ever had. Our flight to Atlanta was fine. But after that things went south. The flight we had to take us to Rochester, scheduled for around 11 pm, was cancelled after we had taxied toward take off. Remarkably, we took so long to get going that the pilot "timed out"; that is, he'd reached the time limit for flying. So we had to go back to the airport and deplane.

Then, if it's possible, matters actually got worse. We stood in a long line at Delta until they got us a flight home for the next day--it was around 1 am by this time--and vouchers for a hotel. When we got to that hotel there was a long line snaking out the front door with people in our same situation. We were told that we would have to wait for up to three hours to get a room. Eventually they announced that the hotel was full and we were back to square one.

We took a shuttle back to the airport--by now it was about 5 am. Jo fell asleep for a short while in an atrium with something like couches, and Pat sat around reading and feeling like a zombie. We spent almost 48 hours with very little sleep and in the same clothes before we arrived home, at last, at around 1 am. The final saving grace: our bags followed us.






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