Note: The trip was not hell. The trip to London was wonderful. But the flight home was horrible!

Sunday, June 19th

The weather today was unseasonably hot for London. It was in the 90s. A far cry from earlier in the week.

We got up around 9am today. Checkout time was noon and we needed to be packed and in the lobby by then. The concierge called a cab for us. It was before 1pm when we got to Heathrow airport and we had about three hours before I flight was going to leave. So we decided to eat lunch. We ate at this little french restaurant. We could hardly understand the waiter and he had some trouble understanding us, but the food was good.

After lunch we did a little bit of shopping. We didn’t go to the big, huge Harrod’s store in London, but we did stop in to the much smaller version at the airport. Keaton even got his picture taken with the bear at Harrods. Then we went in to Hamley’s. Again, this was a much smaller version of the seven story toy store in London. We [and by we I mean Grandma Cathy] had promised Keaton we would go to Hamley’s, but we never quite made it. Keaton had some British change left over and decided to get a toy. He wanted to get this small fish tank toy, but we tried to convince him to buy a British telephone bank as a souvenir. He didn’t want no stinkin’ bank though and it was his money so he bought the fish tank. Kids can be so stubborn some times.

Our plane was supposed to leave at 3:40 [15:40], but we didn’t even have a gate until 3:30. Then we finally boarded at 4pm [after standing in a very long line in a very hot corridor for half an hour] only to sit on the plane for 45 minutes with no word from anybody as to what the hold up was.

Finally the steward announced that there was a problem with air traffic control. Apparently the radar had gone out that morning and all planes were delayed. The steward said they were waiting on confirmation as to how long it would be before we could take off, but it would be anywhere from an hour to two and half hours.

At around 7 or 7:30pm we finally got on the runway. But the captain announced we were 17th or 18th in line and it would be another 45 minutes or so before we actually took off.

I started to listen to air traffic control on the airplane radio. Listening to them talk I discovered there was a problem with one of the planes in front. “Oh great,” I thought. It felt like we would never take off. All I wanted to do was get home to my family. Luckily I called Lee from the plane [using mom's cell phone]. Otherwise he probably would have tried to pick us up from the airport at 9pm, but I was pretty sure by that point we wouldn’t make it to the airport that night.

The pilot of the stalled plane in front decided to get it off the runway. And we FINALLY took off around 8pm London time [2pm CT].

We landed in Chicago at 9pm. That was when our flight home was landing back home. And, obviously, we weren’t on it. There was another flight at 10pm, but by the time we got through Customs it was quarter til and we never would have made it. United left mom a voicemail on her cell phone saying they rebooked us on the 8:30am flight, but we didn’t want to wait that long. Luckily mom had called Candy from the plane and she reserved a rental car for us.

So after finally finding the Hertz bus and getting to the Hertz location at O’Hare, we got in to our rented Nissan Armada and headed home. I drove the whole way while Keaton slept and mom nodded off. The trip from Chicago took us about 3 1/2 hours. I got home around 2:15 in the morning; almost 24 hours after I woke up yesterday morning. I was never so happy to be home. Everybody was sleeping, but I gave them all big hugs and kisses and finally crawled in to bed. Aahhh. Heaven!