**Continued from the last post of my time in Heathrow on December 19.**
After seeing the Republic of Canuckistan, I tried to sleep on the floor for a bit, but by 4:30, people were already lining up for the desks to open at 6, so I got into the line. I got a text from my brother that said Heathrow was supposed to be closed until Monday, but I remained hopeful. I started chatting with some of the women waiting with me in the line, and found out that some of them had been even worse off than me, having been stuck in Heathrow since the day before.
The chaos of the queue. Heathrow was ridiculous that day. It was like a refugee camp or something.
6:00 came and went pretty quickly, without anyone showing up at the counters, so we decided that there wasn’t much of a queue because no one was going to come and help us. Then we just sat there and waited for any kind of update as to what would be happening.
One by one, airlines were cancelling all their flights for the day. Air Canada just kept saying to wait until 9:30 “for more information”. Finally at 9:30, they cancelled everything and told us that we needed to phone their reservations office to find a new flight. I had to borrow someone’s phone to call my parents and tell them what was happening.
Everyone started trying to rebook their flights. One of the women I was with managed to get through after 30 minutes of being on hold and reschedule her flight and one other girl’s. Just as she was trying to help me out in rebooking my flight, her phone died. I tried to go find a pay phone to call for myself, but they all had huge lines. Luckily, I managed to get a hold of my parents with a text message (my phone was running very low on credit), and asked them to try calling for me.
I wandered around by myself, not sure if I would be staying in London, or if I would have to go back to Lancaster on the train, and I tried to nap. At that point they weren’t even letting people into the terminal anymore, so there were just crowds of people stuck outside with no idea what was going on. When any of them finally managed to get in, they had to find out from other passengers that all the flights had been cancelled (there were still a couple airlines that flew out a flight or two, but that was it for the whole day).
I ended up running into some people that I had been queued up with, so I stuck with them while I waited for news about rebooking my flight. My parents finally phoned me back and told me that they had just spent the past 3 hours on hold with Air Canada. When they finally got a hold of someone, they were told that the next available flight would be for December 26, and that was the day I was supposed to be flying from Canada to Italy, so it was no good. Then my parents decided to try and find me somewhere to stay in London. We couldn’t think of many people other than relatives of relatives, but we thought it would be good to try just in case they were able to add some extra flights so I could get on one.
I fell asleep under a tin foil blanket, and when I woke up, my parents told me that they had found someone for me to stay with. It was my cousin’s fiancée’s cousin. Good enough for me. I got in contact with her, and directions from her and her husband to get to their house via public transit, and headed off.
They picked me up from the tube station, and we went to their house. I got to meet her parents (aka my cousin’s fiancee’s aunt and uncle), and then we had some dinner. After dinner we decorated the tree, and it turned out beautifully with its red & gold “Mystical Forest” theme.
Our masterpiece coming together.
Putting the star on.
The little pinecone decorations were my favourite.
They had told my parents that I would have to sleep on the couch, but then they were able to find a bed for me, so I just went to sleep (without much of a plan of what I was going to do).
Next - exploring London instead of Canada.
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