UK03 – Wednesday, 19 Feb 03

A few weeks before we left on vacation, Katherine somehow started using a little phrase in conjunction with her opinion on courses of action being proposed. “That would make me so happy” or “That would make me so sad.” It’s cute as hell, let me tell you.

And, once quoted to the party, it became a tag line for quite a number of discussions.

Another popular line was a childlike intonation of “Dirty,” voiced whenever someone else made a double-entendre.

Of such things are inside jokes made.

Margie and I got up, I showered, and we headed down for breakfast at 7:30a. Doyce and Jackie’s alarm clock had never worked properly, so they asked us to knock on their door (we were back in the same rooms we’d been in when staying there earlier). They were already awake, and joined us for breakfast.

We went back upstairs, brushed our teeth, and hiked off for the car. It was a simple jaunt back out the A4/M4 to Heathrow (stopping to fill up with gas on the way), simple enough to drop off the car (passing the tin of cookies Margie had brought with us to the rental car people, who seemed well pleased), and simple enough to get to the terminal.

Heathrow is, by the by, just a damned ugly airport, grey and ugly and functional and sprawling, with absolutely nothing to recommend it aesthetically save for the fabulous duty-free shopping area you pass through on the way to the gates. It’s as if they spent all their decorating budget there.

The lines were long at both the American check-in and at security, but they moved quickly. Things were still a bit hectic from the winter storm in the northeast US a few days before. We had no time for the duty-free, though, and headed directly for the gate.

We boarded the 777, taking up seats directly opposite the ones we’d flown on, and took off into the somewhat sunny London sky at around 11:10a.

Oh, one other aesthetic high point of Heathrow. It has a great rotating radar tower, straight out of Thunderbirds.

The trip back had little to recommend it. I did a bunch of the typing of these posts from my notes. I watched Knockaround Guys (which couldn’t decide if it were a dark comedy or a violent tragedy) and The Tuxedo (as charming for the send-ups of the Bond genre as for the amiable Jackie Chan). We read. We drank lots of water, and ate airplane food and made regular leg-stretching trips to the head.

Finally, some 10ish hours later, we descended into LA, hot and tired and with most of a day left to burn, it being only 2:30p, locally …

The mechanics of the INS/Customs check was kind of annoying at LAX. We were coming in through the Terminal 3 customs, and with a 777 planeload (two hundred people? Three hundred?), they only had two people doing Immigration checking on the non-US side, one person (as far from the front of the line as possible) on the US (or Canadian) Citizen side. The smiling faces of Bush, Cheney and Ridge gleamed and glistened at us from a side wall.

We eventually made it through that set of lines, and they provided free Smarte Cartes for us to carry our luggage. Which is good, since we knew we had a bunch of Kitten luggage to pick up, too.

(A parenthetical comment. At Heathrow and Gatwick, the luggage carts are free. At most US airports I’ve gone to, they’re a few bucks, minimum. I like the UK system better.)

There were two lines of Customs folks there. We chose the short one, which turned out to take twice as long as the long one.

Ultimately, we made it through that, too, with no problems. We only declared a couple hundred dollars of stuff, since, really, that’s all we spent on goods we brought back.

And … out into the lobby. With no parental units to be seen.

I’d left my cell phone (and keys) with them, since there was no point in hauling it all over Britain. So I had to use the pay phone to call my mom’s cell. Which was blocked by the big parking structure they were in. So then I tried my dad’s, but MCI still thought my calling card was in use. So then …

Well, about then my folks showed up, and Kitten was really happy to see us and even let me give her a hug.

We gathered together our stuff and, like Hannibal crossing the airport, we headed over for the Frontier terminal.

It was, alas, about 15 minutes too late for us to get on the mid-afternoon flight to Denver, so we were stuck on the 7:25p one.

Annoyingly, since we were checking four bags, we couldn’t let the TSA folks standing right there, like bumps on logs, do a security review of our luggage. Not that they had anything else to do, but procedure was procedure. Instead, we had to take it down the hall to the big scanner, where, eventually, they took it from us, ran it through, opened at least one bag (that we could see – the visibility of what they were doing sucked), and then let us know, hey, we weren’t terrorists after all.

Well, then — what to do, what to do?

We wandered over to the Tom Bradley International Terminal, which is one of the few which has shops and restaurants that aren’t past the security checkpoints. And then, my folks, God bless ‘em, sat around with us for three hours, as we nibbled desultorily on some dinner, ate some ice cream, watched after Kitten, etc., even as the hour was getting more and more midnighty back in London (i.e., our internal clock time).

At last, it was time to head to the gate. We bid farewell to my ‘rents, and shuffled through security to the gate.

Katherine did much running about with some other kids, which we encouraged so as to tucker her out. She was already looking pretty tired (though not so tired as us), as we filed onto the plane.

Margie says Kitten lasted a few seconds longer than I did, and I’m not sure I wasn’t asleep when we took off. I was down pretty much the whole trip, though not well – my bruised tail bone from a couple of years back did not take well to sitting on my butt on an airplane all day, so it was pretty difficult to find a comfortable position on the flight to Denver.

We did get into Denver, though, without further incident. We managed somehow to be the last folks off the plane, since our procedural coordination was like a finely tuned machine that had been running non-stop for going on 24 hours. Just as well, since I almost left my cell phone in the seat-back pouch in front of me, and had to run back for it.

We trouped through the deserted Concourse A, rode the train off to baggage claim, pulled our bags off, and discovered …

… well, discovered that my jacket was missing.

Yes, the Eddie Bauer jacket I picked up before the trip, the very efficient wind- and rain-shell that will show up prominently in many photos taken, which was stuffed into an outside pocket at Heathrow so that it could be pulled back out when we got to Denver … was gone.

I was tired enough that I would have just let it ride, but Margie, bless ‘er, had been convinced that article theft was going to skyrocket once the TSA’s “never lock your luggage” rule went into effect, and so she marched over to the Frontier baggage desk, and filed a loss report. The guy there averred that LAX is pretty problematic with baggage theft. He also noted that the TSA should have labeled any bags they checked, which they do not seem to have.

Hrm.

Drove home, Kitten and Margie snoozing in the back seats. Stumbled in, put Kitten down, crawled into our own, beautiful, comfy, lovely, soft beds, and zonked out.

UPDATE: For (a few) pictures related to this post, go here.