The flight from London to Chicago was quite nice. It was a completely full 777; I originally had an exit row seat back on row 31, but because of the need to seat standby passengers in coach, I got bumped up to business class, which has much larger seats, better blankets, ammenities kits, and pretty good meals. If I were a drinking man, i would have also appreciated the wine and spirits selections. I didn't do much sleeping, but it was quite comfortable for reading, watching a movie, and jotting down some notes for work. I don't think I'd pay the $250 + miles that AA wants to upgrade to business one-way to Europe, but it was certainly a much nicer experience than the usual cross-pond flight.
When I got into Chicago I found out that the evening flight to Austin had been cancelled due to bad weather between the cities. American booked me on the first flight for the next morning, but they only offered a "distressed traveller" coupon that would let me stay at some far away Holiday Inn Express for $70 as compensation for the delay. Fortunately,
tangoglenn hails from Chicago, and his mom was able to pick me up and give me boarding for the night. I returned to O'Hare about 5:30AM thinking my return flight was at 6:35 instead of 8:35, and I found huge lines at all the check-in desks because of cancellations of flight to and from New York. It took me about an hour to check-in from the First Class/AA Frequent Flyer line; I feel really bad for the throngs of passengers that had to wait in the standard coach lines to get their travel arrangements repaired.Picasa is grunting along with the task of pulling pictures off my SD card from the trip to the UK. There are 646 pics on the card -- I don't actually have that many to post, as I used burst mode to take a lot of the pictures so I could pick the best show, but I'll still have several hundred by the time I'm done importing them into my computer. I'm going to make several Flickr sets, one for each major location. Hopefully, I still remember enough from the trip to put quality captions. I've already previewed some of them, and while most of the shots are pretty pedestrian, there are a few really nice ones. I'll post when they're online.
