I departed from PIT last night after a final day spent frantically trying to prepare the house for a guest and document its various eccentricities (as a friend will be house/cat/car sitting for me while I'm gone). Marisa was an incredible help throughout the day and dropped me at the airport at the end.
The PIT to Heathrow flight is a
red eye, (as is proper for East coast>Europe travel), and due to our location in Appalachia, PIT has very few evening flights aside from European red eyes, and only three of those (British Air, Iceland Air, and Aer Lingus). The airport is a ghost town by 20:00, and my flight was at 21:45.
So fifteen minutes after I was dropped off, my bags were checked, I was through security, and I was sitting comfortably near my gate. As usual, I Am Very Good At Airport still applies.
Heathrow, in the other hand, seems to be actively getting worse at Airport?
We had been delayed taking off because somebody saw an animal "the size of a dog" on the runway (as our captain cheerfully put it. My money is on the absolutely idiotic assholes that are Pennsylvanian deer.) so airport ops had to drive around in the dark in a search pattern before we could depart. The captain used the ominous phrase "resolved" to describe the situation when we got going, which I'm hoping means somebody who works for PIT has 60+ lbs of Venison in their trunk and a big dent in an airport ops vehicle's front bumper.
And since that meant we arrived at the same time to the Heathrow airspaces as all the other red eyes from further back in the country, we got to do a little racetracking before we were permitted to land.
That left me with about 55 minutes to make my connection at Heathrow.
I was thankful I had checked my backpack, as the slog through Heathrow involves another security checkpoint and lots of walking between gates and a passport processing queue when you're changing flights to make an international connection.
It's a huge hub airport for Europe, but nobody seems to have told it's designers that, so none of these things are especially elegant or well connected.
A polite BA employee has been stationed at our arriving gate to instill an appropriate amount of panic in the inexperienced travels about trying to make their connection, and thankfully she also reminded us how the train worked and which stop to use because the wayfinding signage in Heathrow is not even trying to be helpful at directing traffic elegantly anymore. It genuinely seems to have given up.
So we get through security (where you have to take off any shoes that cover the ankle, even if they contain no metal to speak of, which ALSO gets no signage and therefore involves lots of exasperated instructions from tired employees and people going back to put their shoes in a bin after their bags are deep in the bowels of the machine) and at this point despite the fact that our flight departs 45 minutes from now the rare departure screens that we can glimpse hidden around the terminal are flashing the airport language equivalent of "Run, you'll never make it" about our flight?
Which is at Gate A10.
Ok. A Gates aren't that big so I'm not worried, so I follow the signage that directs me to a lift (or a secret escalator tucked behind it), which I ride down into the depthsl of Terminal 5 A gates to find ... a small bus terminal?
Because gate A10 is actually GATES A10a through A10e. That's right. Five gates in a trenchcoat! All loaded by bus! How whimsical!
And the sign at the bottom of the escalator tells me (despite the fact that it's 11:05) ominously, in red, that the doors for the Paris flight at 11:45 flight are Closing? And lists 11:25?
Wild.
So I pick up my place and find almost a hundred people still waiting to be loaded into the buses so phew, the pressure is off.
But then we get into the bus and we drive... An entirely unreasonable distance? It's probably 10 or 15 minutes but it feels like 20.
The route involves two tunnels, at least one gate that make it feel like we're Leaving Heathrow, several roundabouts, and what felt like at least one highway. Adding to the comedy, the bus driver is clearly aware we are late, and also it might be his first day, so acceleration and deceleration are both... Dynamic, and the bus has these absolutely geeeeenius straps for stability which can free slide in the direction of travel, which causes some truly comical careening of less braced passengers during our, uh, road trip.
lol what is this? Who was allowed to invent these?! Jail. Jail for a thousand years.
So anyway...by the time we finally got to our aircraft some of the passengers were concerned we were driving to Paris, and one guy asked if our departing flight was out of Gatwick.
It was a time.
We get loaded up by 11:50 (no wonder they close the gate so viciously early) and it's off to Paris, which is also struggling with some new technology but not doing nearly so badly at it.
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