Wow, what a crazy five or six weeks I've had! I'm 'cream crackered'! Paris, Boston, New York, Berlin and Birmingham! (Yeah, maybe the last one isn't quite as exciting... no disrespect to Brum - my Dad's from there - but it really didn't hold the same magic as 9 days in the US!)
Boston & Blue Skies
Travel can be such a bl**dy fiasco, can't it? I set off from the hotel in Boston at 1:00 PM on Thursday 11th and got to the airport with around 3 hours to spare... just in case. Good thing, 'cause I found my flight to Newark, New Jersey, had been cancelled but luckily (or so I thought at the time) they checked me in on an earlier flight. Then notices started to appear on the displays that this one was now delayed. After finally boarding, the plane just sat on the tarmac for another 90 minutes waiting to get a take off slot. When we finally got airborne I realised it was going to be touch and go about making my connection to Birmingham (and no... that wasn't my visit to Birmingham, I was there again a week or so later!) In fact, as we landed in Newark and taxied in I could see a Continental 757 pulling away from a gate... I hoped it wasn't mine, but despite the mad dash (treating slow moving people in the way with the sort of respect a bowling ball shows 10 standing pins), I found the gate closed and the gentleman behind it informing me of what I was now painfully aware of... I'd missed my flight back! (And I've never done that before in all my years of travelling!)
The Continental 'help' desk (inverted commas for a good reason!) gave me a couple of choices: going to France a few hours later then flying out from Paris the following afternoon to Birmingham; or staying over locally and repeating the attempt to jet off to Birmingham direct, just 24 hours later from the flight I'd missed. I chose the latter and was given a voucher for a hotel at the airport. Great I said, but what about my bags? (For a change of clothes etc.) "Oh, if you want your luggage, I'll key into the computer to get them sent through. Just go down two floors to baggage reclaim and they'll guide you..." I duly did this and sat in front of Carousel 9 waiting for my case. Nothing for 45 minutes, so I went back to baggage reclaim where I was told it can take an hour. Half an hour later I went back to the desk, and was told it was going to be two... "Just wait another hour". Nothing. After three hours the local yanks got a taste of some pure Anglo Saxon vocabulary! I was then told by the new person on the desk that as I had requested the bag after 7PM it would NOT be dispatched and was now in a storage hold awaiting tomorrow's flight. More Anglo Saxon vocabulary. (Sorry, but I'd sat there like a lemon for three hours having been completely misinformed by the so called 'help team'. I was also very tired and hungry!) So, without luggage, I then took the shuttle bus to my hotel only to find that by now all the rooms were taken! ("we didn't think you were coming, Sir.") Argghhh! The receptionist made a call and I was told another bus would take me (and the collection of other unfortunates) to an alternative hotel that DID have rooms. After trying to board two busses that said Holiday Inn (ah, but not to MY Holiday Inn), eventually a minibus arrived and drove us all to some Newark suburb called Carteret... A Holiday Inn Motel right next to the 14 lane New Jersey Turnpike with hot and cold running trucks rumbling through the night completely free of charge!
Anyway, all's well that ends well, because after some business on Friday morning, I found myself with four or five hours to kill before my flight check-in. Looking at a map, I realised that the turnpike headed all the way into New York, so a few minutes later I got a bus and an hour later was in Manhattan charging up 8th Avenue towards Central Park, then heading down 5th counting the 'Wests' down from 57 to 34 for a quick jaunt up to the top of the Empire State Building! Wow! Absolutely fantastic it was too! (Though somewhat of a 'brown trouser job' for people like me who suffer from vertigo!!)
Manhattan from the Empire State Building as the clouds roll in
I no doubt ended up shedding pounds (of sweat, I hasten to add!!) in my three hour mad-dash, just getting back in time on the bus to flag the courtesy airport shuttle down... I know I can cut things fine, but it was leaving 10 minutes early, damn it! So, I've 'accidentally' got to see a little of New York as well as loads of Boston! Boston, by the way, was superb... a fantastic place! I had two free days at the start (as I was working Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday) so I walked the red-brick 2.5 mile Freedom Trail, went on the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" (the oldest still commissioned warship in the world, launched in the 1797), drank beers in Cheers (yes, it's a real pub!), and The Bell In Hand (the oldest pub in America) and on Saturday took a bus out to Cape Cod...
I'll write about Berlin when I've got my Breath back...
All the best,
Chris
Boston & Blue SkiesTravel can be such a bl**dy fiasco, can't it? I set off from the hotel in Boston at 1:00 PM on Thursday 11th and got to the airport with around 3 hours to spare... just in case. Good thing, 'cause I found my flight to Newark, New Jersey, had been cancelled but luckily (or so I thought at the time) they checked me in on an earlier flight. Then notices started to appear on the displays that this one was now delayed. After finally boarding, the plane just sat on the tarmac for another 90 minutes waiting to get a take off slot. When we finally got airborne I realised it was going to be touch and go about making my connection to Birmingham (and no... that wasn't my visit to Birmingham, I was there again a week or so later!) In fact, as we landed in Newark and taxied in I could see a Continental 757 pulling away from a gate... I hoped it wasn't mine, but despite the mad dash (treating slow moving people in the way with the sort of respect a bowling ball shows 10 standing pins), I found the gate closed and the gentleman behind it informing me of what I was now painfully aware of... I'd missed my flight back! (And I've never done that before in all my years of travelling!)
The Continental 'help' desk (inverted commas for a good reason!) gave me a couple of choices: going to France a few hours later then flying out from Paris the following afternoon to Birmingham; or staying over locally and repeating the attempt to jet off to Birmingham direct, just 24 hours later from the flight I'd missed. I chose the latter and was given a voucher for a hotel at the airport. Great I said, but what about my bags? (For a change of clothes etc.) "Oh, if you want your luggage, I'll key into the computer to get them sent through. Just go down two floors to baggage reclaim and they'll guide you..." I duly did this and sat in front of Carousel 9 waiting for my case. Nothing for 45 minutes, so I went back to baggage reclaim where I was told it can take an hour. Half an hour later I went back to the desk, and was told it was going to be two... "Just wait another hour". Nothing. After three hours the local yanks got a taste of some pure Anglo Saxon vocabulary! I was then told by the new person on the desk that as I had requested the bag after 7PM it would NOT be dispatched and was now in a storage hold awaiting tomorrow's flight. More Anglo Saxon vocabulary. (Sorry, but I'd sat there like a lemon for three hours having been completely misinformed by the so called 'help team'. I was also very tired and hungry!) So, without luggage, I then took the shuttle bus to my hotel only to find that by now all the rooms were taken! ("we didn't think you were coming, Sir.") Argghhh! The receptionist made a call and I was told another bus would take me (and the collection of other unfortunates) to an alternative hotel that DID have rooms. After trying to board two busses that said Holiday Inn (ah, but not to MY Holiday Inn), eventually a minibus arrived and drove us all to some Newark suburb called Carteret... A Holiday Inn Motel right next to the 14 lane New Jersey Turnpike with hot and cold running trucks rumbling through the night completely free of charge!
Anyway, all's well that ends well, because after some business on Friday morning, I found myself with four or five hours to kill before my flight check-in. Looking at a map, I realised that the turnpike headed all the way into New York, so a few minutes later I got a bus and an hour later was in Manhattan charging up 8th Avenue towards Central Park, then heading down 5th counting the 'Wests' down from 57 to 34 for a quick jaunt up to the top of the Empire State Building! Wow! Absolutely fantastic it was too! (Though somewhat of a 'brown trouser job' for people like me who suffer from vertigo!!)
Manhattan from the Empire State Building as the clouds roll inI no doubt ended up shedding pounds (of sweat, I hasten to add!!) in my three hour mad-dash, just getting back in time on the bus to flag the courtesy airport shuttle down... I know I can cut things fine, but it was leaving 10 minutes early, damn it! So, I've 'accidentally' got to see a little of New York as well as loads of Boston! Boston, by the way, was superb... a fantastic place! I had two free days at the start (as I was working Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday) so I walked the red-brick 2.5 mile Freedom Trail, went on the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" (the oldest still commissioned warship in the world, launched in the 1797), drank beers in Cheers (yes, it's a real pub!), and The Bell In Hand (the oldest pub in America) and on Saturday took a bus out to Cape Cod...
I'll write about Berlin when I've got my Breath back...
All the best,
Chris
