Newbury to Heathrow

Work had been manic. I’d spent the afternoon talking people through my projects and now I was frantically trying to send out the e-mails with the details before my bus was due to leave. Running out of time, I hammered out the bare essentials and shut down my computer. I grabbed my rucksack which had been sitting by my desk and raced for the bus. Thankfully, I got to the stop before the bus did - I was en route to Brazil.

At the RailAir bus station in Reading train station, I called a couple of people and left messages on their computers for Monday morning. We were called to assemble outside as the bus was ready. I suspect that the First bus company must have a fairly rigorous interview and selection procedure for its bus drivers. Sadly, customer awareness doesn’t seem to feature too highly within the criteria and so the foreign couple who didn’t know which terminal of Heathrow they were heading to were treated with absolute disdain by our driver.

The driver deemed it unnecessary to announce which terminal we were arriving at each time the bus stopped, which was a shame seeing as the signage around Heathrow leaves a lot to be desired. I got off at the third stop and was fortunate to be at the correct terminal. I headed inside with my rucksack looking for the Varig check-in desk. Although I successfully found their ticket counter, I was still a bit confused about the check-in desk. Another hunt around, and I eventually figured out that I needed to queue in the SAS lane for the Varig flight. Obvious, really. At the head of the queue, a guy from SAS asked if I was going to Brazil. I confirmed this and he asked whether I would consider postponing my trip until the following evening as the flight was overbooked. The financial incentive was good, but given that I had a connecting flight, not to mention a group of 15 people elsewhere in the airport waiting for my arrival, I though it best to stick to my plans.

After I got checked in, I headed up to Burger King to get some dinner. Stressing that you want a plain Chicken Royal in Heathrow is like telling the storm clouds that you don’t want rain. Picking up my parcel, I headed through security and arrived into the shopping zone of Terminal 3 Departures. I began to look for the rest of the group. My first circuit failed to spot them and so I headed around again. I was just beginning to wonder how I was ever going to find them when I spotted a sea of yellow off to my right. It transpired that the ‘matching T-shirts’ comment in a previous e-mail hadn’t in fact been a joke and that Alistair McCauley had decided that the colour of the said matching T-shirts (which came resplendent with a picture of the church and a To and From address front and rear) should be yellow. Not just yellow, but VERY yellow. I sat down with the group to eat my dinner and was promptly handed my very own yellow T-shirt which I was expected to don at the first available opportunity.

As I munched on my dinner, Neil gave me a call to find out where I was. Seemingly, my lack of yellow T-shirt meant that certain members of the group couldn’t actually see me. After finishing off my dinner, I made a couple of calls to family and then gave in to the pestering and donned the said yellow T-shirt. I then went shopping for some bits of electronics that I had been looking for before returning to our base.

Near the time of the flight, enquiries were made about the wheelchairs that were expected for transporting 3 of our less mobile members to the gate. This seemed to surprise the staff, but, after a little gentle persuasion, we managed to get a buggy and a driver and the rest of us raced along the corridors of Heathrow to a gate which must have been somewhere near Slough given the distance we walked.

Although we were there on time, the flight was delayed due to a drunk refusing to leave the plane. The police were called and boarding pushed back an hour. Eventually, at about 11pm, we were ready to board. Next stop Brazil.