London says it is noon, I say it is 6:00 am
Yesterday I left for Portugal at 6:30 - on an entirely different set of flights than I originally booked. Upon arriving at the St. Louis Regional Airport (some may call it Lambert), the representative for US Airways knew exactly who "Mr. Clark" was, and said he was expecting me. Now at first, I must admit, I figured he had gotten wind of my recent achievements and that is how he knew me. However, it was actually because my flight leaving St. Louis was not even close to being on time, which would leave me stranded in Philadelphia since I would miss my connection to London.
No worries however! (So he said...) They found out this information prior to my arrival and had rerouted my flights, and I would be arriving in Lisbon at the exact same time. At this moment, I actually was pleased with the service of an airline for the first time in recent memory. After a few different American Airlines representatives, I was all set. I just needed to get my boarding pass to Lisbon when I got to Heathrow in London.
The flights were nice, although I did wind up sitting next to someone that kept trying to chat me up about Vampires. Interesting Scottish guy, although I must say i'm glad we were going separate ways after leaving the aircraft in London. Upon my arrival in London, I was able to become very familiar with Terminals 1, 2, and 5. I flew into terminal 1, and basically did a few laps between terminals 1 and 2 trying to find the airline desk for TAP Portugal, which everyone in terminal 1 told me was in terminal 2, and vice versa. At this point I finally figured out that the TAP desk did not exist. It was actually part of the Minzes desk, which is actually part of the Lufthansa desk. It was really quite obvious the whole time, since neither TAP nor Minzes is not mentioned anywhere, in any way shape or form, in any proximity to the Lufthansa desk. Stupid Americans! They should know these things.
Now the airline industry is back at par, which was technically sub par depending on how you look at it. Regardless, it's 6:12 in the morning (12:12 was my sleep cycle catches up), and I have replaced sleep with a thorough knowledge of scottish vampire lore.
Time to find a toro rojo. I've got to be awake for the dinner at A Braslleira in the Bairro Alto neighborhood tonight! I'm also taking bets on which country my luggage shows up in. I'll take 5 on not Portugal.
Cheers.
Part of trip:
Europe 2009