Blimey, it's been a day of money-throwing expenditure in the Mitten household, although mainly spent on a fairly long and ardous trip to Heathrow Airport and back to wave off, once again, a respected family member to the "Land of the Free", (despite not letting in anyone suspected of terrorism). Yep, Laura has once again gone on her magical trip to Camp America, but it didn't half cost us a lot to get rid of her!
We left at midday, hoping it would take an hour and a bit, but it in fact took us the best part of 2 hours, stopped by roadworks with no one working on them as usual. We were expecting this, but as we neared Heathrow the roads started to have a lot of writing on them, directing commuters and unlucky others to certain parts of the humungous airport and I have to admit, I thought we were going to end up driving on to a plane and ending up in Papua New Guinea. It was ridiculous. However .. after a lot of confusion and 3-point turns we made it to Terminal 3 and started our ascent of the multi-storey car park. A swivelled road up the multi-storey we went, like a helter skelter, until we reached Level 2, (Level 1 being at the top ... this is Heathrow remember..), and went round the one-way system of the multi-storey car park to find a space which was as rare as an England World Cup win, which means we only found one. You only need one space though, don't you! The BMW next to us thought otherwise though and merely reversed his bus into 2 spaces and inadvertently knocked the wing-mirror off the car the other side of him. Funny times.
The worst was yet to come though, as we had parked up, we needed to work out where to go. Despite being here twice in the last 2 years, no one knew where to go and we needed to take 3 lifts just to get to the 'Departures' bit, and along the way I heard not one word of English being spoken. French, Spanish, German, Urdu, Australian ... but not English. Tut tut. Anyway, since we had been asked to be in attendance at the airport way earlier than we needed to we sat down and had some lunch. A few sandwiches and a few drinks, maybe £10-£12. Nope. The Asian man behind the counter came out with a bearly distinguishable grunt of, "£22.50 please sir". How much?! Father Mitten accepted the payment and we went to eat the extortionate panini and the rest on rather uncomfortable chairs and then went on our way. Never mind.
Check-in time came, eventually, and that of course meant time to weigh the bag. Now, for those of you unaware of new airport rules, your main bag can be no more than 23kg and of course Laura's was 28.5kg. That meant an additional charge. £10 per kilogram.. For those of you with a mental arithmetic age of a 4 year old, that's £55. Just for a few extra clothes and a few bottles of make-up, (which inadvertantly cost Mother Mitten £40 this morning), just so she was allowed to fly. Now really, is 5kg of luggage going to make the plane crash? Yes? Oh well then, better safe than sorry. So, £22.50 for lunch plus £55 for extra luggage, and still the airlines couldn't fly a month back because of a bit of ash. Surely all this money they're charging could of hired a machine to blow the dust to Mars?
Oh well, money had to be paid or Sister Mitten would be staying at home, incredibly unhappy and grumpy. Still, the parking would be cheap.
Ha, what a funny guy I am. Earlier in the day, I had paid a solitary pound coin to pay for an hours parking to pop into town for a while. At Heathrow Airport though, we had stayed for 2 hours and paid £8.40. That's EIGHT POUNDS AND FORTY PENCE. That's just insane for a 8x10 rectangular piece of concrete! How stupid is this place?! However, rather craftily on BA's part, we had no choice but to pay up and get out in fear of being stuck there for all eternity.
We had to get out first though, so we went back down the helter skelter and out on to the road with the Bible written on them and nearly ended up through the pilot's window of a life size model aeroplane with 'EMIRATES' on the side of it. We didn't though and we embarked on our return journey through roadworks with no one working on them with Father Mitten adament that 'Gold FM' was the radio channel of choice. Even then we nearly ended up on the M4 to Slough. Deary me.
So I'm home now. Finally. Curry and a pint for £4.99 anyone? Wow.. that's cheaper than the cost to hire an 8x10 slab of concrete for 2 hours... Bedford's amazing!
Cya x
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