We finally arrived here in Barcelona for our cruise departure on Wednesday. The flights went from San Antonio, to DFW, London Heathrow, and finally to Barcelona.
We had barely made the flight to LHR because for some reason our flight from San Antonio limped into Terminal A. Sixteen minutes to taxi left us with seventeen minutes to catch our next flight! We ran, caught the train to Terminal D, making the plane by three minutes. Only one couple had not yet boarded the plane, and they were on the same flight from San Antonio! Then, after we were seated and got ready, the plane developed mechanical problems.After waiting an hour on the ground, the pilot declared the airplane “not airworthy”. We thought, “oh this sucks.” But being Dallas, there was another 767 available. It took 3.5 hours but we swapped aircraft and got our nine hour flight into London Heathrow.
London Heathrow is the worst airport on the planet. Awful, terrible, horrible. Whoever designed that mess did it on a dare … as in how many signs can you put up pointing to the wrong thing? One guy gave us bad directions to the Admirals Club. We figured it out about 30 minutes later, and had to go back into a security line. After the security line, we got back into one of Heathrow’s malls.
Yes, mall. Some idiots decided to make Heathrow a shopping mall. There’s actually one in Terminals 3 and 5. It’s awful. There about 5 perfume stores in terminal 3 and ALL of them are spraying their products … a lot. So you can’t walk around Terminal 3 without running into a half-dozen people wanting you to buy Chanel.
Then we got to the Admiral’s Club. The snooty person working the desk there finally admitted us, but then asked to look at the tickets again. She said we had better catch the bus to Terminal 5 or we’d miss our flight. At the time, we had an hour and 45 minutes before takeoff.
Are you kidding me?
There’s a bus from terminal 3 to terminal 5. No one would tell us where exactly the bus was, other than “down at the other end of the terminal.” No one knows exactly where things are in the airport.
The terminal 5 is remote. It took about 15 minutes to get over there from Terminal 3. Once there, we had to go through Security AGAIN, even though we had been screened and were in a secure area. This time, screening was a full-fledged assault. I can tell you, I’ve been in a line when TSA was having an inspection and it was NOTHING compared to this. Very intrusive … and they just don’t care. Don’t like it? Complain to the EU commission. We made it to the gate with seven minutes to spare.
No more LHR unless someone else books it for me without any warning.
As bad as Heathrow is, British Airways is awesome. It felt like flying a Southwest with meals and designated seats. They gave us a pre-wrapped ham sandwich, something I desperately needed at the moment.
