Okay, so maybe my title is a tad bit misleading. I should clarify that we made it back to the US safe and in one piece, but it certainly felt like we were going to be stuck in London forever. As appealing as an elongated trip in the beautiful city sounds sounds, it did not seem so in the moment, but first I’ll back up a few hours and explain what led up to our 10:00 pm arrival in Pittsburgh.
I write this in retrospect as I’ve had some time to get settled in at home and return to work after our two week adventure in the United Kingdom. It was such a bittersweet feeling taking my luggage to the bus in the morning because I knew I would miss the atmosphere of Scotland, but I missed my family and pets even more at the moment.. We headed to the airport around 8:30 am, and I mentally said farewell to the beautiful town I had made my own in the past few days.
Upon arrival at the airport, we said our goodbyes to David and made our way through security. I made sure I got a juice for the flight considering I had become an avid morning juice drinker while on the trip and waited with others from the group util we could board our 11:30 am flight to London Heathrow. While on the plane, I watched The Dressmaker, which I highly recommend, and before I knew it we were already landing. At this point, we had one flight down for the day and one to go!
We arrived around 1 pm, so some of us headed to Pret to grab lunch, which was about the third time I had done so on this trip, and with a few hours to go (or so we thought), we made our way to a crowded lounge area to wait for our final flight of the day. The large electronic board informed us we would receive our gate number at 3:15 pm, but when the time came it was pushed back to 3:30 pm. Fifteen minutes after that, we still didn’t had a specific gate number, but knew we would be using one of the B gates. The group as a whole decided we would gather our belongings and make our way to B to wait out the rest of the time.
I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that we did NOT fly out of London at 4:20 pm. With technical difficulties on our plane, we didn’t end up boarding until around 5:45 pm, which was a journey itself requiring us to to walk down a flight of stair to the outdoors and take a bus over to our plane. Sitting on the plane by 6 pm, I was relieved we would finally be taking off soon, but that would have been too good to be true. The difficulties were still being corrected, and needless to stay, I watched a quarter of Bohemian Rhapsody, another movie I recommend, before we were even ready for departure.
Fast forward through my sitting in the middle seat for 7+ hours to us FINALLY landing at Pittsburgh International Airport. I made it through customs, grabbed my luggage, and trekked through what felt like the underground parts of the airport before being greeted by the smiling faces of my parents and sisters. After two weeks of minimal communication, I was so happy to see them and to be back in my favorite city and home.
As one of the two business students on the trip (shout out to Jocelyn), I was skeptical that I would get anything out of the media visits or even find them interesting, but I can honestly say I have learned so much and was very entertained by many of the agencies. I am so grateful that I stepped outside of my comfort zone and went on this trip. It was an experience I will never forget.