The next day the sun rose at its customary hour, presumably beginning another beautiful day in Barcelona. But by this time we were well on our way to the airport, as we had tickets for an early British Airways flight to London. We’d arisen in darkness, prepared ourselves for the day and left the hotel an hour or two before breakfast was to be served, planning on finding something at the airport. We’d dragged our luggage and ourselves back up a mostly empty La Rambla, toward the Plaça de Catalunya. I’m not sure when the nightly revelry along the street had concluded, but few people were about. In the pre-dawn gloom we noticed a bench that was holding up an unconscious young man, with another more alert young man sitting next to him. This other young man seemed to be the best friend in life to the one whose full attention was on a world other than ours. His posture was one of protectiveness, and he seemed to be saying soothing words to his oblivious companion. On closer examination, it was apparent that he was expertly working his way through the unconscious man’s pockets. This prompted a couple of observations - first, that the "friend" had a future in politics, and second, that those who drink themselves into oblivion on La Rambla take their chances.

We eventually reached the Plaça de Catalunya and found the Aerobus stop in front of El Corte Inglés. The buses leave for the airport every ten minutes starting at 5:30, and we didn’t have to wait long. Our ride to the airport was uneventful, and we checked our luggage, got our boarding passes, went through security and made our way to the gate. With everything going smoothly, we were pretty early, and the gate area was not very busy.

We were a little uncomfortable about things going so smoothly, as experience told us to beware of having a false sense of security. Those of you who read about our trip to Italy might remember a mechanical problem with our plane causing us to miss a connecting flight (and to spend an unplanned night) in Toronto.

We found a perfunctory breakfast, eventually boarded our plane, and enjoyed a punctual and uneventful flight to Heathrow Airport. So far, so good.

Western Europe with Route Med   Lrg	Gironde Estuary, Southern France Med   Lrg
Approaching British Coast Med   Lrg	Twickenham Stadium (Mainly Rugby) Med   Lrg

We ate lunch and killed time during our five-hour layover at Heathrow, idly noting that the weather had taken a turn for the worse, with some light rain starting to fall. We weren’t very interested in the weather, as we would be gone in a few hours.

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British Airways 747 and Raindrops Med   Lrg   Xlg

And we were – our flight to Los Angeles boarded and departed at the scheduled time, and we were home free. Until just past Scotland, that is. At this point the pilot came on the PA system and said that an indicator light had come on, and that it was probably nothing, but that we would have to turn back to Heathrow to get the issue resolved. So we made a big U-turn and headed back toward London.

Somewhere around Manchester we turned right and headed in the general direction of Dublin. The pilot told us that "as a precaution", we would have to dump off most of our fuel prior to landing, and the best place to dump it was apparently into the Irish Sea.

So we headed west, and short of the Irish coast we circled back toward England.

Since the plane had just taken off, there was a lot of fuel to dump off, so we circled around for awhile until the fuel finally got down to the desired level.

By this time there was a certain amount of suspense among the passengers, who wondered if there really was some kind of problem with the plane that might get us posthumously onto newscasts around the world. But as it turned out we landed safely, with nothing obviously different from any other landing. Except that the passengers applauded.

The airline told us that there were no more scheduled flights to Los Angeles for the day, and that we would have to spend the night in London, at their expense. This seemed like it might be a cool thing, until we found that our hotel was the Hilton at Terminal 4, located across the airport from where we’d landed, and several miles from any London points of interest. They gave us vouchers for dinner and breakfast, but from the prior year’s experience we knew the dinner voucher wasn’t very useful unless you got to the hotel while they were still serving. We didn’t know how late dinner would be served, but the evening was no longer young, so we were a little more assertive than most of the passengers (who seemed to be somewhat disoriented) in boarding the shuttle bus for the hotel.

And it was a good thing we were, as we arrived at the hotel about twenty minutes before their buffet was to close. We didn’t even bother dropping our luggage off in the room, leaving it in a pile near our table as we hastily dined. The buffet was actually pretty good, I think. The room was fine, but the offered amenities were expensive (a British Pound was about $1.50 US at the time). We assumed the airline wouldn’t cover them, so we didn’t touch them.

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$22.50 Internet Med   Lrg   Xlg

The next morning we had time to enjoy the breakfast buffet.

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Hotel Lobby Med   Lrg   Xlg

Then we took the shuttle bus back to our terminal (not Terminal 4), wearing the same clothes as the day before. We spent more time in the same boarding area as the previous day, killing a little of it watching the airline workers load cargo.

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Loading Cargo MP4-Sml   MP4-Med   WMV-HD

At last we got onto our new plane and were able to make it back home without further incident. Back in Los Angeles one of the Hollywood gossip shows on TV (I don’t remember which one) mentioned some courageous (I think female) celebrity’s harrowing flight from London to Los Angeles, which was forced to turn back to avoid falling from the sky, or something like that. Whoever she was, she was no doubt in first class, safely insulated from the unwashed masses. I wonder if she applauded.