August 25th, 2014
A few days before my flight back to North America I left Weymouth and travelled up just northeast of London to visit a friend Vicky who I met in India. The day of my flight I planned to meet the daughter of a girlfriend I dated back in 1996 for lunch as Jessica happened to be working in London. I hopped on the train on a wet, windy day and just five minutes from the station there a loud whoosh as a train passed by in the opposite direction but then there were some loud thwacks on the roof of the train and I saw pieces of branches falling down. Immediately the train slowed to a stop although it wasn’t a sudden emergency halt. The train was fairly empty although my car was noisy with a bunch of teenage Germans on some school trip. After about twenty minutes there was an announcement that the train had hit a tree, but not too much more information was given. Soon after the driver of the train walked down the aisle and reiterated what had been said on the speaker. He looked a bit shaken and I asked him if everyone was alright and he said yes but I don’t think that this was a day he wasn’t going to forget.
After about an hour another train pulled up alongside ours and we were all instructed to walk up to the front of our train to board the other one. Talk about a “Mind the Gap” moment. With my tandem paraglider on my back and a smaller backpack on the front, it was a bit of a step to go from one train to the other. By tandem backpack got slightly wedged in into the doorway of the disabled train as I tried to pull myself over to the rescuer. Don’t worry, I made it. The new train took us just 10 minutes down the line and everyone had to exit at the next station. At this point there was a lot of confusion as to what was going to happen next. Many passengers were headed to Stansted Airport to fly back to continental Europe and I could tell that many people were going to be missing their flights. I wasn’t too worried as I had buffered in an extra 6 hours before my flight but time was starting to run its course. I texted Jessica and told her that unfortunately our lunch date wasn’t going to happen. I then texted Vicky to give her an update and she graciously offered for her and her mum to come and pick me up and drive me to the nearest tube station. So in came my cavalry to save the day. Susan and Vicky arrived in the pouring rain and whipped me off to Easton, the furthest northeast subway station in London and now my challenge was to make it to the far southwest of London to the airport.
Being the end of the tube line, subway trains left from both sides of the track back into London. I didn’t clue into this right away but then realized that the train on the other side of the tracks was where I wanted to be. I hoofed my way up the stairs of the pedestrian bridge with my heavy gear and was frustrated when the older people in front of me took their sweet time to make their way down the stairs. And my anxiety was warranted, just as I got down to the platform the doors of the subway car closed and off it went. Damn it. Okay, six minutes until the next train on the other platform. So back up the stairs I trudged. Now I was starting to get a little concerned about catching my plane. It was only 3 hours before the flight, the recommended time for checking in for catching an international flight, and still had to tube it about as far as possible from one side of London to the other. Arriving at Heathrow I dashed through the pedestrian tunnels to get to the terminal but yet again my luck was stymied. The moving sidewalks weren’t functioning! I made it to the check-in counter a little more than an hour and a half before the flight and my little travel “bumps” didn’t stop just there. My paraglider bag was too big to fit on the conveyor belt to be shuttled on to the plane. Which also meant that it couldn’t properly be weighed so I was escorted by an airline employee out to some big weigh scales. My enormous bag was a kilogram over the allowed amount so I pulled out some clothes to stuff into my carry-on bag. I finally got checked in, made it through security and was able to relax. Wowsers, that wasn’t easy and I’m damn happy that I had that extra time to make it there, at the cost of missing lunch with Jessica but otherwise I would have not caught my plane.
The flight was easily the easiest trans-Atlantic flight I’ve had. My seat was right near the back of the plane, not normally lucky, plus the seat layout was 2-4-2 and I happened to be on the inside of the middle. However, since it was near the back I lucked out and had an empty seat on both sides, the only one in the whole plane. Additionally, since we were heading west it turned into an almost never ending sunset which was gorgeous and amazingly the eight hour flight zipped by.
Next stop…the U. S. of A.
A few days before my flight back to North America I left Weymouth and travelled up just northeast of London to visit a friend Vicky who I met in India. The day of my flight I planned to meet the daughter of a girlfriend I dated back in 1996 for lunch as Jessica happened to be working in London. I hopped on the train on a wet, windy day and just five minutes from the station there a loud whoosh as a train passed by in the opposite direction but then there were some loud thwacks on the roof of the train and I saw pieces of branches falling down. Immediately the train slowed to a stop although it wasn’t a sudden emergency halt. The train was fairly empty although my car was noisy with a bunch of teenage Germans on some school trip. After about twenty minutes there was an announcement that the train had hit a tree, but not too much more information was given. Soon after the driver of the train walked down the aisle and reiterated what had been said on the speaker. He looked a bit shaken and I asked him if everyone was alright and he said yes but I don’t think that this was a day he wasn’t going to forget.
After about an hour another train pulled up alongside ours and we were all instructed to walk up to the front of our train to board the other one. Talk about a “Mind the Gap” moment. With my tandem paraglider on my back and a smaller backpack on the front, it was a bit of a step to go from one train to the other. By tandem backpack got slightly wedged in into the doorway of the disabled train as I tried to pull myself over to the rescuer. Don’t worry, I made it. The new train took us just 10 minutes down the line and everyone had to exit at the next station. At this point there was a lot of confusion as to what was going to happen next. Many passengers were headed to Stansted Airport to fly back to continental Europe and I could tell that many people were going to be missing their flights. I wasn’t too worried as I had buffered in an extra 6 hours before my flight but time was starting to run its course. I texted Jessica and told her that unfortunately our lunch date wasn’t going to happen. I then texted Vicky to give her an update and she graciously offered for her and her mum to come and pick me up and drive me to the nearest tube station. So in came my cavalry to save the day. Susan and Vicky arrived in the pouring rain and whipped me off to Easton, the furthest northeast subway station in London and now my challenge was to make it to the far southwest of London to the airport.
Being the end of the tube line, subway trains left from both sides of the track back into London. I didn’t clue into this right away but then realized that the train on the other side of the tracks was where I wanted to be. I hoofed my way up the stairs of the pedestrian bridge with my heavy gear and was frustrated when the older people in front of me took their sweet time to make their way down the stairs. And my anxiety was warranted, just as I got down to the platform the doors of the subway car closed and off it went. Damn it. Okay, six minutes until the next train on the other platform. So back up the stairs I trudged. Now I was starting to get a little concerned about catching my plane. It was only 3 hours before the flight, the recommended time for checking in for catching an international flight, and still had to tube it about as far as possible from one side of London to the other. Arriving at Heathrow I dashed through the pedestrian tunnels to get to the terminal but yet again my luck was stymied. The moving sidewalks weren’t functioning! I made it to the check-in counter a little more than an hour and a half before the flight and my little travel “bumps” didn’t stop just there. My paraglider bag was too big to fit on the conveyor belt to be shuttled on to the plane. Which also meant that it couldn’t properly be weighed so I was escorted by an airline employee out to some big weigh scales. My enormous bag was a kilogram over the allowed amount so I pulled out some clothes to stuff into my carry-on bag. I finally got checked in, made it through security and was able to relax. Wowsers, that wasn’t easy and I’m damn happy that I had that extra time to make it there, at the cost of missing lunch with Jessica but otherwise I would have not caught my plane.
The flight was easily the easiest trans-Atlantic flight I’ve had. My seat was right near the back of the plane, not normally lucky, plus the seat layout was 2-4-2 and I happened to be on the inside of the middle. However, since it was near the back I lucked out and had an empty seat on both sides, the only one in the whole plane. Additionally, since we were heading west it turned into an almost never ending sunset which was gorgeous and amazingly the eight hour flight zipped by.
Next stop…the U. S. of A.
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