So I should be blogging this from New York, but actually we are in Minneapolis!
Yesterday Pete and I were obviously apprehensive that we would actually even get off the ground in London. We’d been been following the weather firstly for London and then on Boxing Day for New York because of the massive storm they were expecting. London ended up very clear yesterday, and it seemed out Delta airlines flight was the only one leaving for New York that wasn’t affected by New Yor’ks weather. We kept checking the status of our flight and it was on schedule the whole was. Awesome! We were met by the valet parking service right at the front door of our terminal, and we managed to find our check in desk and check our luggage within 30 minutes! Awesome! So far our journey had been a piece of cake and Pete and I agreed that if we managed to get off the ground and get to New York the gods would have been smiling down on us. We found a Starbucks to leech the free wifi,
then moved to the viewing windows after a while. We waited patiently for our gate number to come up and when it did we realised we were already sitting at the correct gate. Awesome! Boarding started and we took our seats and set off on schedule. Awesome!! 🙂
About 2 hours from landing the Captain comes on, oh no. Sure enough our flight is being diverted because JFK is now closed because of the snow. Oh no! We were diverted to Minneapolis, a good few hours inland! Thankfully Pete had world Atlas on his ipad so we could quickly look up where we were actually heading. Pretty much mid-America in my view. The fun didn’t stop there. Pete started getting sick. Not long after our diversion news, He started getting a stomach crap and had to go throw up within half an hour. The nausea continued for about an hour but thankfully subsided and he was feeling ok again by the time we started our descent. We’d really had visions of him being as sick as I’d been a few days before. We landed at 2am-ish London time and 9pm-ish local. Thankfully Delta had already arranged for everyone to be put up in a local hotel and a flight back to New York the next da. Phew! We waited in the freezing cold outside for our shuttle the the Hotel Inn Bloomington which eventually arrived and we finally managed to check in and get to bed around 11pm (4am for us! Tired!) and got some sleep, but not before watching some American TV adverts and a bit of The Late Show with David Letterman 🙂
It’s now just before 8 am so shower time and then get some breakfast with our Delta meal vouchers and maybe see a glimpse of Minneapolis before our flight to NYC (hopefully) at 2:30pm
Later…
Took a taxi from Hilton Bloomington Minneapolis to Mall of America, a huge mall with a theme park in the centre. Afterwards took a taxi to the airport at about 12:30 for our 2:30 flight to JFK. Flight kept getting delayed and we eventually boarded and too off at 8:30. We didn’t know if we’d have to circle JFK for a while waiting to land but it turned out there was a medical emergency on board so we were pushed up the queue and landed at 12am, same for being taxied to the terminal, It took 1hr for us but a plane the day before had made news for waiting nearly 12hrs on the tarmac! All because the airport had practically no staff because of the snow. Anyway we disembarked quite quickly after the ‘medical emergency woman’ and made our way to baggage collection where we all waited for over 3 hours for our luggage! It truly was travel hell. We queued in a long queue in the cold for a taxi to take us to the airport which cost $50, but was sell worth it because we were exhausted! We finally hit the sack at about 4:30 am!
