I do not like Heathrow airport, and it does not like me. To begin at the beginning, we woke up on Sunday, May 31, at 7:30 AM, planning to leave for the airport at noon for our 3:30 flight. Bill ran to the grocery store to get some bacon. I just happened to check my email. We received a mysterious email from travel, saying our flight had been changed to Monday, June 1. I tried to log in to my Viking.com account but couldn’t. I looked at the British Airways website, and it had the Monday, June 1 flight as well. We texted Jeremy. He was no help, but an email he had forwarded to us previously had a phone number for Viking, so I called them, and a rep named Sparkle let us know that British Airways canceled our flight and rescheduled us for one on Monday. The problem was that Monday is the first day of our extension. We would not arrive until Tuesday morning. She rebooked us on a flight departing at 12:50 pm on Sunday, with two connecting flights. That left me around 5 minutes to log in and select seats. We headed to the airport a little after 9 AM. We flew to Philadelphia, where we waited with a British family who shook our section of the chairs with a rousing rendition of “The lady goes trot, trot, trot.” I don’t think farmers gallop, but I had to let that go. Once we boarded, we flew from Philadelphia to Heathrow, where we are currently sitting, waiting until 8:25 am, when they will tell us which gate our 9:15 flight will depart from. We will then (hopefully) fly to Zürich, Switzerland.
When the gate was posted, it was only a few hundred yards from where we had been waiting. While we were seated waiting for our boarding group, a woman came over to ask us a few survey questions about our experience at Heathrow. When I told her we were American, she said she was sorry about all the problems. I told her we hadn’t voted for him, and she said, “Of course you didn’t!” She said it sounds to them like there are just shootings everywhere and asked how it feels to be surrounded by people with such strong and different opinions. We were among the last people to board, and after the relative comfort of premium economy, it felt like sitting in a shoe box. Takeoff was delayed a bit, giving us time to listen to a young boy read aloud the names of every nearby aircraft to everyone nearby. Once we were finally in the air, the flight itself was ok, but the landing was rough. The wind was apparently a bit much, so the pilot touched the plane down but “disengaged,” and we went back up to circle around and try again. Between that bouncing, a general lack of air, and a dirty diaper nearby, both of us were feeling rather nauseated, and there were no air sickness bags to be found. Thankfully, with help from my portable fan, we made it without incident.
We were slow getting through the airport thanks to long lines in the women’s restrooms, but our Viking person was waiting for us. She contacted our driver, Wolfgang, who drove us to Lucerne in a Mercedes-Benz.
We met Sky, our host for our Lucerne extension. She is originally from Istanbul but has lived in Switzerland for 20 years with her German husband and her three teenage kids. She used to work for the Red Cross in Geneva. The hotel was gorgeous, with a view of the lake and the Alps. The hotel reception gave us an overview of our room and left us to relax. We were asleep by 3:30, skipping the welcome drink and dinner.
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