London Travel Pt. 1: Ryan vs. Northwest Airlines

Even though it’s Thursday night it really feels like one whole long blur of a day since I left Erie. I’ll have to break things up a bit. Here goes.

I got up Wednesday morning and still had plenty of work to do. My suitcase was packed but I still had to find some of the things for and pack by bookbag. Also, I wanted to print the PDF readings that I’ll need for the course. Most of the packing went swimmingly after a small problem with finding my camera cable. Printing the PDFs, however proved more of a challenge. Loading PDFs on 56k is painfully slow, so it quickly became evident that printing ALL the PDFs would be nigh impossible. Then, my printer ran out of black ink and I had no replacement cartridge, which made me shift printing downstairs to my Dad’s computer. In the end, it was time to go and I had to get the bag fully packed and shut so I just stopped printing where I was. I’ll just have to print the rest out in London.

Then, we left for the airport, making a detour on the way to say goodbye to my Grandma. The Erie Airport, as per usual, was a breeze to get through. I had no trouble at all with security and ticketing. I said goodbye to the parents and shortly after was in the air en route to Detroit.

The flight was the most pleasant Erie-Detroit connection I’ve ever had. It left on time, arrived early, and I wasn’t crammed into too awkward of a position. I hit ground in Detroit and headed towards my gate, noting on the way the location of the currency exchange. On the way to my gate I noted a flight boarding to Amsterdam with a huge line of people waiting to board and it was nearly an hour prior to scheduled departure. I knew I would need to be at my gate at least 60 minutes before departure. Still having plenty of clearance, I went to the currency exchange for some pounds. The guy at the exchange was either ornery or unable to hear me because he fairly yelled at me when I forgot to specify whether I wanted to change $100 or to buy 100 pounds. We got that sorted, though, and I got my money. By the way, it turns out British banknotes are wider than US notes.

Now comes the fun part. I got to the gate with plenty of time and we boarded with nothing out of the ordinary. We were scheduled to depart at 6:10 PM. At 6:15, we are told there is a slight maintenance issue, nothing major, and that we’ll get going as soon as it’s sorted. At about 6:45, we get the message that, in fact, the problem will take a bit longer to fix. We’re now aiming for 8:00 as a departure time and we may have to switch planes. At this point we had already been waiting for upwards of an hour and were quite frustrated. Five minutes later or so, we get the message that yes, we will switch planes. We all had to deplane and then go from A66 to A28 where our new plane would be. We were still aiming for an 8:00 departure.

On the way to the new gate, I discover that my headphones have suddenly stop wanting to work properly. Thankfully, there’s a headphone store right by the new gate and I plunked down for new headphones before waiting to board. While waiting to board, I realized that my old boarding pass seemed to have disappeared, so I had to go to the counter to get a new boarding pass. Finally, we boarded and at around 8:05 we took off...