We are back from Britain and I'm finally running around slowly enough to blog a little again.

Britain was a lot of fun - we probably spent a little too long in Ilkley hanging out with my family, but there were things which needed to be done so there wasn't really any truncating our first week in Yorkshire.

The really funny thing is how the snow followed us around.

When we landed in Manchester, it was snowing. Then it snowed some more in Ilkley. It didn't snow when we were driving to Cornwall or when we stopped in Oxford on the way, but it did snow in Cornwall itself. And then when we arrived in London we woke up the next day to an inch of snow on the ground. None of this snow slowed us down. We hadn't brought the best shoes with us for walking in the snow, but then it wasn't us that fell in the bog on Ilkley Moor either so this didn't matter in the end.

The snow finally caught us in Newark, NJ. The flight over from Manchester had been very pleasant: adequate food to eat, nice films to watch, and quite an easy run through US immigration (slow, but then when isn't it?). After we had rechecked our bag we made our way down to the gate we would be departing from and saw the snow coming down, or rather sideways. Flights started to be delayed, our own flight was pushed back from 6pm to 9pm.

They finally cancelled our flight at about 9:30pm, one of the last flights to be abandoned. We had a plane at our gate, the luggage had been loaded on and food had been inserted into the kitchen, but there was no crew. The snow storm had moved off to the east after coating Newark and had apparently sat on Boaton airport, which was where most of the crews were... including ours.

One unwelcome stay in a slightly manky hotel later (which was too expensive because all of the cheaper rooms had been nabbed by earlier cancellations), and we were back at the airport waiting for our plane. Most of the passengers on the cancelled flight had been rebooked on the same flight the next day, which meant a full plane and that our quite nice seats the day before were turned into agonisingly tiny seats on the flight we actually got onto. Our row was right where the back of the plane starts to taper, and so they try to fit three seats into less space. Only about three inches less space, but when the seats are so godawfully narrow in the first place the loss of that space is keenly felt.

I'll try to write intermittently about some of the more positive aspects of our trip over the next few days, but right at the moment I am still dealing with back pain from being jammed into that crappy seat so I am not feeling very positive.

Posted by Dunx at March 11, 2005 10:30 AM