Indeed! What she should have said was "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport. Although it looks like we arrived in the middle of the night, the actual time is 4:27pm and the temperature is 2 degrees above freezing and dropping rapidly. You will be lucky to get any kind of ground transportation as the recent snow storm has traffic at a standstill and trains are suffering massive delays. Good luck getting out of the airport - you'll need it."
Initially my plane was two hours late, but all that meant was that Jet and I got to spend an extra hour together. The landing into Heathrow was probably one of the smoothest I have ever experienced, and considering how much I have travelled, that's pretty amazing. After I disembarked the plane, where earlier an angry French steward told me to "go look in Club" when I asked him for help finding a place to stow my overhead luggage, I went through Immigration. Usually a long and boring wait, I was pleasantly surprised at my short wait time, and even more surprised at how friendly my Immigration officer was! I then continued downstairs to wait for my luggage and found that it was already there waiting for me. This, I thought, was Mercury playing tricks on me.
I made it to the National Express office, where I purchased a ticket for the 787 bus to Cambridge via Luton, due for a 5:45pm departure. The lady working there advised me that there were some delays as all the airports (excluding Heathrow) were closed, but to make my way outside to wait for the bus. 5:45 passed, 6:15 passed, 6:45 passed. At 7:15pm the bus arrived, loaded the bags, and then drove to the Central Bus Station that served as the coach stop for the other 4 terminals. And it was here that we lost our driver. He left us to drive another coach in the opposite direction, but he got permission from the control room and left the inside lights on, the keys in the ignition, but the heat off until our next driver appeared.
Other travellers waiting were getting very irate but I just took out my knitting and sat in a coach that was getting colder and colder. A very mad Greek man called me Madame Defarge - the character in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities", who during the French Revolution would knit the names of the people she wanted killed into her yarn. Admittedly I was getting very cold and tired of hearing the people working for National Express tell me "your bus is leaving in 5 minutes", but wanting people dead is a little far fetched! It's all about asking the right question, and after 4 hours of waiting I finally worked out what that question was. "Are you going to get us to Cambridge tonight?" and when I heard the answer was "yes" I was fine. The night still had quite a few hours left - especially on the shortest day of the year.
After a 6 hour wait, our bus (still containing the angry Greek man who had threatened to leave several times over) left the terminal, bound for Cambridge. And at 1:30 am I reunited with my cousins amidst a flurry of snow and ice underfoot.
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