Another long travel journey begins, starting with our New Year’s Eve overnight flight to London Heathrow, catching the National Express bus to Gatwick, napping at the airport Hilton in a day room and then the long overnight flight to Mauritius.  Phew.  Starting off the New Year with a bang.

The first part of our trip works perfectly, we have a virtually free rental from Budget (due to their screw up in Montreal) and the drive to Charlotte is a breeze.  We have about 3 hours before our flight, so we hit the lounge, joining the 20 minute queue, but finally gaining access which was a good thing as our flight was delayed right off the bat.  The incoming equipment was late, which meant we were late.  More lounge time.

Finally heading to the gate, where they kept saying they would start the boarding process soon – which ended up being 45 minutes later.  Yikes.  We’re really late now.  To add insult to injury, after we board, we sit on the plane forever while it looks like they are fixing a toilet, and then they go to the back of the plane and take 2 people off.  Very weird – they had no luggage or anything, just coats.  Finally we push back only to sit on the tarmac for another 20+ minutes – making us 2 hours late taking off.  We wouldn’t really care except we have the Gatwick bus booked and it costs to change the reservation – which is fine, but we don’t have a clue what bus we will make since we are so late and then have to go through passport control and get our luggage.  And it gives us less time to sleep at the Hilton.

Ah, the joys of travel.  It is only made worse by the fact that American Airlines can really just be a crappy airline.  The attendants were good, but the food was abysmal and these pilots never, ever talked to us. We got no updates, no explanations or apologies for the delay, no nothing.  And on top of that, not once did anyone wish us a Happy New Year.  We were flying through New Year’s Eve!  The least they could have done was given us all champagne!  Honestly. 

We ended up being about 1 ½  hours late, making us miss our 9am Gatwick bus, and by the time we got wifi (oh yeah, we had no wifi on the plane without paying for it) we couldn’t change our bus tickets – we had to buy complete new ones.  No thank you – that’s like 35 British Pounds each – we’ve already paid for them once, we aren’t paying twice.  We figured we’d find a human at the bus terminal and beg forgiveness.  At least passport control and retrieving our luggage went pretty quickly, meaning we were trekking over to the bus terminal a little before 10.  There were indeed humans at the desk who looked at our ticket and just said, you can take the 9:55 bus leaving for Brighton.  No fuss, no muss, no change fees, they barely looked at the ticket!  We were out the door, on the bus and riding out of Heathrow in 5 minutes flat.  One hour and 15 minutes later we arrived at Gatwick South Terminal, trekked inside to check our bags – which was a chore as we couldn’t do it automatically and had to have a BA counter attendant do the whole thing – then hoofed it over to the Hilton for our day room.  Grabbing a beer and wine for the room, we made ourselves comfortable and promptly fell asleep for a few hours, leaving us fairly refreshed for our 12 hour flight to Mauritius.