Never again through Heathrow part II

We woke up really early, and caught the shuttle to terminal 1/2/3 at 6:20. We were at the terminal around 6:30 and took the free shuttle to Terminal 4. We were there more than 3 hours ahead of time for our 9:55 am flight to Amsterdamn. International flight. 3 hours right?

KLM wouldn't let us check in. There was an earlier flight. They had a limited number of workers checking people in.

So we waited and had breakfast. We got in line early, before our alloted 8am time. Given the crowds, that didnt' seem like long enough, so we snuck in line early. But we couldn't tell which line was which - there was a flight to Africa that was going through check in at the same time and it was also a very long line right next to our line.

Once that was sorted out, we waited and waited and waited. There was one set of people checking in that had to completely rearrange their bags to get under the 25kg weight limit. I swear they spent 1/2 an hour with 1 person behind the counter. Then 2 of the maybe 5 attendants were shifted to working for Air Malta instead of KLM. There was still like 2 of them on the "business and first class" section, but only like 2 or 3 for coach.

All in all it sucked.

On the counter when we finally got to it was a notice about planes being delayed for bad weather and they couldn't guarantee connections. We had maybe a 1 hour layover. If everything went well. Bad idea on our part.

They booked us on the flight, and said we'd just have to check in Amsterdam about our flight.

We got on the flight and the on board computers that showed connection information were saying we had to check our arrival gate. It also showed that the Seattle departure gate as E17.

E17 was empty as we rolled passed when we finally landed. The plane had left. And it wasn't even due to leave yet. It left 15 minutes early.

So we had to work with the transfer agent who was going to put us on a plane that went through Minneapolis and got us into Seattle around 12:30 am. That would be 10 hours later than our original arrival time. I asked if there was a flight through Detroit and if so, what time did that leave. She said 5 minutes before the Minneapolis flight. I asked for that one, but she said that there were no connecting flights to Seattle that same day. I asked for it anyway, because my parents live 30 minutes from the Detroit airport.

So much to Matthew's chagrin (he wanted to get home on Sunday), we stopped in Ann Arbor for a night. My parents were so happy to see us! We flew home the next day and arrived about the same time (one day later) we would have if we had caught the direct flight from Amsterdam to Seattle. So all in all that worked out - Amsterdam's airport rocks.