Worst Trip of My Entire Life Thanks to a Storm & British Airways

Not having seen my aunt and uncle in close to two decades, my dad and I decided it was time to visit his sister, my aunt, in Copenhagen Denmark.

I was kind of nervous from the start for some reason, I guess it maybe had something to do with not having seen her in so long but I also was excited.

It was going to be a two week trip and so I packed on large bag, which I was going to check at the airport, and a backpack as my carry-on luggage.

There was absolutely no problem when we got to Dulles airport, we were processed in no time and before I knew it we were sitting on a on a plane and flying to England where we were supposed to have a 3 hour layover and then we'd be in Copenhagen and hour after that.

I'll admit that the flight went pretty well and after several hours of flying we landed in Heathrow Airport and this is where our problems began.

We got off the plane and went through customs and as soon as we went through we were immediately lost.
I guess the Brits don't believe in signs and expect travelers to use some sort of homing beacon to find their way to the right terminal.

Nevertheless, we found our way around somehow and all of a sudden it happened. An electrical storm of epic British proportions and as you might have already guessed, like dominoes the flights started showing "delayed".
How long were we going to be delayed? Nobody knew for sure but it was going to be some time before we were going to leave merry old England.

There was a distinct possibility that we might even be there overnight as we rived during evening hours.
The time ticked by and we spent around three hours trying to get information about our flight from anyone and everyone that looked like they might work for the airport or airline.

The storm continued and through the large glass panes you could see lighting strikes streaking across the sky and landing a punch somewhere in the UK.

It's then that it happened, our flight was CANCELED. It looked like we were going to be spending the night right there in the airport.

We hadn't eaten in a good 10 or 12 hours so getting food became our new quest, we found a little restaurant that was attempting to look like a upscale and classy Denny's . Beggars can't be choosers, so we went inside and sat down at one of the tables. Soon enough a waitress came by handing us our menu's and inquiring about our drink selection for the evening. I had a Diet coke and I have no clue what my dad had.

As much as this restaurant attempted to pass themselves off as a "classy" or "posh" place, it was painfully obvious that they were a small fish in a large airport shaped aquarium. Realizing that we may be taking our lives in our hands by ordering something unfamiliar we decided to get a couple hamburgers.

I mean really, if you think about it, it's kind of tough to completely screw up a hamburger it's just one of those foods that required very little effort in comparison to other dish's. If you get down to the nuts and bolts of the whole thing, a hamburger ranks right up there with scrambled egg's as far as difficulty of preparation.

Ten minutes went by and no food has arrived at our table, another ten minutes and still no hamburgers. Yet another ten minutes was threatening to roll by when our food finally arrived. I look at this thing that they called a hamburger and grew very suspicious of this object. It was gray, semi cold, with a texture that really didn't seem like it belonged on a hamburger patty .

Nevertheless what was I supposed to do, I poured a lot of ketchup on the "burger" and took a bight. The experience can only be described as depressing. This burger tasted bad, had the consistency of rubber and it was cold. Now when I say cold I don't mean it was room temperature but rather it was a refrigerator kind of cold.

Yet, as depressing as this burger was there was a glimmer of hope as my eyes scanned the plate and stopped at the steak-fries. Now, steak-fries are another food that isn't hard to prepare, it was abundantly obvious that these steak fries were of the frozen variety rather then freshly made. This, in and of itself is not a deal breaker for the french-fry connoisseur but it did raise concerns given the sorry state of the hamburger that the fries accompanied on the plate.

I poked at one of the fries lightly with my fork and it seemed like it was going to be crispy, at this notion I rejoiced and stabbed the fry in order to enjoy it's salty, ketchupy goodness. It was very unfortunate that only a section of the french-fry I poked at had the qualities of a good steak-fry because the rest of it's length drooped like a wet dishrag.

I didn't know if we had angered the airline gods or whether there was a voodoo curse put on us but things were not even remotely going our way.

We downed our dinners somehow and had a little bit of fun when we met some American students who were traveling across Europe. It was a regular chit-chat type of thing and soon enough we were back in the belly of the beast known as Heathrow.

I don't know how we passed the time and how we were able to retain our sanity but perhaps things would go smoother from here on out. So, when the first streaks of light started to pierce the darkness outside things started to look up, there was hope that we would soon be boarding a plane thus completing our trek to Denmark.

As the sun slowly rose in the sky, revealing that the weather had improved, Heathrow started to wake from it's slumber. Starbucks kiosks were doing what they do best and the air was perfumed with the delightful scent of coffee.

We didn't get any breakfast because we just wanted to get out of there and get to our destination. We marched down to the same desk that we went to for information the previous day but they weren't as helpful this time. They instructed us to go to a different section of the airport and go to some sort of customer center, or whatever they called it.

Upon arriving at our new quadrant of the airport a streak of anxiety went through us. Our blood ran ice-cold as we discovered a line of people literally a quarter mile long. Now I want to repeat that, this is not an exaggeration, there was a line of people a quarter mile long and this line of people was for the very customer center that we were instructed to talk to about which flight we would be flying on.
Where did all these people come from you might ask. Well, this line of people were all the other passengers from all the other flights that had been canceled the day before.

We got in that line very quickly since it was very obvious that there would be more Heathrow refugees arriving and contributing to this line.

A metamorphosis occurred, this line of strangers all waiting to ask their questions at the desk had become a super-organism.

Though it had become a super-organism, with each member having the same thoughts as the all the others, same anger, same outrage. The main difference between this super-organism and all the other known super-organism is that this super-organism hadn't showered in a good 30 plus house and was not above attacking itself.

After around 4 hours of standing in a very slowly moving line, we were now close to achieving our goal of talking to the customer support representative and we would soon know which airplane to board.

There was a short verbal confrontation between my dad and a Hasidic Rabbi who tried to bypass the line all together thinking that his religious credentials and curls would give him grace and a time saving as well as underhanded maneuver.

My dad said his peace, the Rabbi turned red with anger but when other voices from the line joined in reprimanding him, he decided it would be wise to shuffle off to the end of the line.

Then a break, we could take a breath, we had arrived at the desk and they started checking out papers and tickets to figure out which plane we were to board. Their report was delightful, they told us that the plane we should have been on had left ten minutes ago. They did some typing and soon revealed to us that the next plane that we could take would be in three hours.

Those three hours ticked by painfully slow but tick away they did and we finally were on our way to Copenhagen.

The flight was uneventful, they gave us sandwiches and we landed in Denmark.

We did our best to beat the crowd to baggage claim and moments after we arrived, my dad was lucky to retrieve his bad. I on the other hand was not as lucky, we must have stood there for over an hour, thinking that perhaps my luggage was in the very back of the aircraft but it was becoming clear that my luggage wasn't going to show.

I was pretty much defeated at that point, I just didn't care any more. My dad went to one of the information desk and they told him that the bag should be in on the next flight and that they would deliver the bag to wherever we were staying.

I had fun during those two weeks, catching up with my aunt, playing with her dog and visiting many of the places from my childhood. My old school was a surreal experience for some reason, I hadn't seen it in so long that it was as if I had dreamed ever going there. During all this time, nobody from the airline had arrived with my bag.

It was the night before we were supposed to leave for home when a car pulls into my aunts driveway and a man from the airline marched up the front door with my bag in hand.

My luggage arrived just in time for me to leave for home with it. My cologne bottle was shattered inside the bag. My video camera was destroyed and I just started to laugh. I don't know if I found this whole thing funny or sad or whatever but I started to laugh.

In the end, what else can you do but laugh.