In January 2018 at the end of our trip to the UK, we spent our last night at Heathrow airport Ibis hotel. Our flight to Sydney the next morning was due to depart at 9.10am and as one of my travel rules is to always check in 2-3 hours prior to departure, I wanted to be at the airport by 7.00am at the absolute latest. It was a strange hotel, with a bizarre layout of corridors and walkway bridges to different parts of the hotel. We’d already gotten lost finding our way to our room. Before bed I set my iphone alarm for 5.00am so the 4 of us (Steve, our two children and I) would have a comfortable amount of time to get ready, pack our overnight bags, have a quick breakfast at the hotel, find our way through the maze of corridors, then catch the airport shuttle bus to the terminal.
I woke before the alarm, it was still dark and quiet with everyone else asleep, so I lay there dozing a little while. Then Steve awoke and asked me “what time is it?” I said “don’t worry the alarm hasn’t gone off yet”, checked my iphone next to the bed – it was 7.10am! “Shit! Quick, everyone up! We overslept!” I shouted. My heart was pounding. I was freaking out, thinking to myself ‘we are going to miss our flight – what are we going to do?’ Panic set in.
Everyone jumped up and started moving very quickly. The kids got dressed efficiently in the clothes I had left out for them the night before while Steve and I took turns to have the worlds quickest showers – 30 seconds each. All the time I kept thinking about how we were living the opening scenes of the ‘Home Alone’ movie and I couldn’t work out why my alarm hadn’t gone off?? Then I realised it was Sunday, and I had left the alarm on the ‘weekday’ setting.
We stuffed all our belongings into our bags, I did my usual quick check around the room to make sure we hadn’t left something behind then we all ran through the hotel maze of corridors and downstairs to reception where Steve called a cab. Within moments, at 7.35am a black London cab pulled up and we were on our way. Thanks heavens it was only a 5 minute cab ride to the terminal.
Somehow we managed to arrive at the terminal check in area at 7.58am with only minutes to spare before check-in closed. Cordy and I used the automatic check in machines and scanned all our passports in to get our boarding passes while Steve and Brandon rushed downstairs to retrieve our larger luggage cases that we had left at the airport lockers overnight.
Boarding passes printed and labels stuck on our bags, we rushed across to drop our bags onto the conveyors in the bag drop area. Relieved the automatic check in process had allowed us to check in and drop our bags, we assumed the flight hadn’t closed yet. However looking up at the departure boards I saw our flight number was already calling us to go to the gate for boarding. Not out of the woods yet we made our way through the departure security screening area in record time. I could not believe our luck at how few people were around – there were no queues at all.
We race-walked through the terminal straight to our boarding gate – Heathrow is such a huge airport, I swear we had to cover at least 2 km to get to our gate! When we finally got there, hearts still pounding, out of breath and sweating, relief started to set in when saw they hadn’t started boarding all the main cabin yet. We were able to sit down and catch our breath for a few minutes. I found a vending machine a few meters away and bought some drinks since we were all thirsty and starving. I had just taken a seat and a sip of my OJ when they called our rows to board. There was no time to relax until we got on the plane and found our seats.
Once on board, as I settled into my seat and got comfortable, I reflected on what had just transpired. I determined that had to have been one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I still to this day don’t know how we managed to make the flight on time!