in Merrie Olde England

Got here yesterday AM, pretty tired, but otherwise ok. Had an interesting trip in some ways. Kate says it's a great story! The shuttle van took me to the airport in plenty of time, but when I reached the counter to check in, there seemed to be a problem. A guy looked at my information and said to the woman at the next desk, 'Here's another one.' I had no idea what that meant! It turned out that the flight to Philadelphia, due in at 6:30 was delayed. (It was only 5 PM at this point.) They said we would miss our connecting flights if we waited (several other people were affected), but that they would send us by CAB to Philly so that we could make out international flights. And that is what they did! Three of us and a great deal of luggage were tucked into a taxi and off we went. Despite some traffic, we got to the Philadelphia airport at 7 PM, which was half an hour before we would have arrived by plane! Must have cost US airways a bundle to do that, but we didn't care, as long as we got there in time.

The flight to London wasn't very full, so I had two seats to myself. The food was the usual airline food (pretty bad), but the seats were comfortable and I managed to get a couple hour's nap. So all was well. However, I hope not to fly US airways again. They are now charging $50 for each bag after the first one, checked through. This is new and I'm sure it wasn't on the website when I bought my ticket, but they claim it's been in effect since August. Luckily, I discovered this before I packed, so I cut down on the clothes I was bringing (can't leave out the presents) and got it all into one very large suitcase, just under the 50 pounds maximum weight, and two carry-ons. Did you know that you can have 40 pounds of whatever in your carry-on? I figure that the only way one could pack 40 pounds of stuff into the rather limited size restrictions on carry-ons would be to fill it with bricks! Going home, I should have much less stuff.