Princeton, New Jersey
May 31, 2008
I feel weary, honestly exhausted. I did a lot today, particularly in the morning. In the morning my father and I moved what he estimated to be at least a ton of rubble in three separate trips from our house to the town dump. That’s a lot of rubble, and it’s all very heavy. It didn’t help that it was about 25 degrees Celsius, sunny and humid either. The afternoon was spent playing some Europa Universalis 3: In Nomine, which I had bought at about 6:30 this morning, and chatting with a couple mates in Britain. Not quite two hours ago, I walked to the public library with my mother to rent a movie, we got the extended cut of Blade Runner. That walk exhausted me completely, I’m sitting here typing, quite hot and with a sweaty brow for no really apparent reason, too weary to actually finish dinner. I have almost no energy despite the can of cherry coke only a few inches from my hand; I’m enjoying the cool breeze flowing in from the two windows and wish that it was stronger and more constant. I’m honestly surprised that I’m actually writing this mini-AAR given how tired I am but I suppose it needs to be done. This, more than most of my writing, is simply a stream of consciousness. This mini-AAR is, however, not about what I did today but how I got to today. And that is quite a story, one that isn’t actually over. I suppose I should start from the beginning, as the beginning is where one usually starts. This all takes place on Wednesday. The longest Wednesday I have ever experienced.
Wednesday started at 0700 as usual for a weekday, with a shower as usual for a Wednesday. Nothing particular happens until my exam on Sea Power at 1330 which was all right and which was my last exam of the year. I was then officially done with my second year at university, whoo. Blah blah blah let’s get to the good bits; at 1944 my train from Cottingham leaves, with me aboard of course, and I start my trek home. I change trains at Sheffield and continue on to Manchester Airport, arriving there at about 2345. This is when boredom sets in, since there’s nothing to do at an airport at night—you can’t even sleep. So I don’t, I keep myself awake with half-hourly sips of rather sugary juice and read some Clausewitz, three parts from On War, totaling about a hundred and fifty pages. Finally, at about 7:20 the check-in process for US Airways flight 735 to Philadelphia begins, after which I go through customs and get to wait another more than two hours until we start boarding. Boarding finishes and we begin taxiing down the runway, setting up for our attack run—err, take-off. We’re about to get off the ground when suddenly, however, the pilot hits the brakes.
His excuse was that he was getting a bad indicator from one engine. Prudent enough I suppose, I’d hate for the plane to go down somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. That would be bad. Fair enough, I suppose. He starts taxiing off the runway, also a good thing since it’s still active. I didn’t want to get smashed by another plane either. Getting away, the captain mentions that it seems like one of the tires has deflated due to high temperatures (as the tires are designed to do that, and temperatures can seemingly get pretty high when a plane which is about to take off suddenly tries to stop). Fire trucks come, which is apparently routine for stuff like this, and we’re eventually taken off the plane and back to the terminal. Okay, fair enough. We wait, without much news, in the terminal for an hour or so (having spent a half hour already in the plane after braking), when we learn the flight is cancelled. Oh bollocks.
We learn that we’ll get our luggage in a bit, and that we’ll be brought to a hotel, complete with dinner and breakfast. Hmm, that doesn’t sound good. Dinner and breakfast; obviously we’re not meant to be leaving the country Thursday then. Of course, however, we had already left it; we had gone through customs, through the gate. We were officially not in the UK any more. First, we had to go back through customs, the other way. That completed, we went to the hotel by bus. It was a nice hotel, though dinner was a bit on the paltry side. Admittedly, it was a buffet style dinner and I didn’t take much, my stomach could barely handle the food as it was. Not having eaten in 23 hours tends to do that, I guess, and maybe the food was a bit too rich for me. After dinner, which was at 17:00, I went back to my room and collapsed. I simply passed out on my bed. By that point I had been awake for about 34 or 35 hours, so that’s understandable.
We had to wake up at 4:40 the next morning as breakfast was at 5:00 and we left the hotel at 6:30 by bus back to the airport. I was dropped off at Terminal 3, which now allows me to say I’ve been to the entirety of Manchester Airport—all three terminals. I don’t know whether that distinction is a good thing or not. At the airport, I manage to get my new tickets. Yes, tickets: plural. I was lucky, as others didn’t get tickets at all, not while I saw them at least, for US Airways had rebooked people for flights but there were more people to go to each new flight than there were spaces on the flights. That’s pretty bad. But anyway, I was lucky and got my tickets—a BMI (British Midlands?) ticket from Manchester to London Heathrow and then a US Airways ticket from Heathrow to Philadelphia. I hung around in Terminal 3 for a while before my flight to Heathrow, and from the Terminal I saw the plane from the day before was still smack out in the middle of the tarmac. It was impounded by whoever it is who investigates technical problems, impounded along with all of our luggage. US Airways can’t even get close enough to the damn plane to even mention releasing the luggage, much less actually doing so. Anyway, the first flight was at 10:30, and went well enough. I think I might have slept a part of it since it seemed a bit fast, but I’m not sure.
At Heathrow I make it to the new gate, and the people there know about the Manchester incident. We’re allowed through a bit early to talk to customer service and I manage to get my seat changed from a middle seat to an aisle seat. A good thing too, since I’m a lanky bastard. We board the plane, get ready and are about to take off when the captain slams the brakes. WHAT.
NOT again. No no no no no. Well, not quite. There was a cargo issue. The cargo loaders somehow not only managed to throw in some baggage bound for Harrisburg, but they put so much of it in that it brought the cargo total to 1100 pounds over the legal limit that any one airplane is allowed to take out of the country. Hello? Mind-boggling incompetence has just rung. So we taxi off the runway (it’s an active runway, remember) and the cargo loaders get to the task of unloading all the cargo so they can get the Harrisburg stuff out of there while we all sit and wait. So an hour and a half goes by and, as you can imagine, me (and some others from the Manchester flight who also happened to be on that flight) were a bit worried that this one would end up being cancelled too. Fortunately not, it was only late. But we got off the ground, finally, and seven and a half hours later (and one and a half hours late) we go to Philadelphia. My parents were there to meet me and we drove home. The pizza we ordered for dinner was the best food I’ve had in five months. That’s the end of the story.
So let’s review, shall we? That was all Wednesday. Oh sure, I got home Friday evening at about 19:30 or so local time, but it was still Wednesday for me. Transit time for me even if the flight had worked out would have been twenty-four hours, this time it was more than double that—about 50. I was shattered at the hotel and when I finally arrived home I was shattered. I fell asleep immediately, though I kind of woke up at 4:30 local time here.
Thus that is the end of my sage of the longest Wednesday I have ever experienced: an exam and a 50 hour travel time to get home involving two trains, three train stations, three airplanes, three airports, a car, two buses and a hotel. That's a bit much.