wine bar
 

IAD is not the nicest airport. BUT...there is a nice wine bar you could grab a drink in if you have time on your outbound to LHR. I think this is in the terminal where UA leaves though I can't be certain. I saw it on an arriving flight from LHR a couple months ago...seemed like the best thing going at IAD.

Good luck making the connection through US Customs on the return. That seems pretty tight considering. st

Good point. Assuming I were to miss it, any suggestions for ensuring I get on an IAD-DEN rather than an IAD-MCI?

Heeeere we go.

It is currently 10:43pm CST. I'm in a semi-dingy hotel one exit away from MCI, ready to begin the voyage. My flight in the morning leaves at 6:40am and, as I'm insanely neurotic, I've decided to wake up at 5am. That will give me half an hour to shower, shave and dress, 10 minutes to get to the rental car center and 10 or 15 minutes to get to the terminal, while still being there 50 minutes early. Yes, I'm a huge wuss.

From MCI I take a quick hop on an RJ to DEN, where I can enjoy a couple hours layover before my push to IAD. I'll post another update from either DEN or IAD with an enroute trip report... and maybe some pictures of me looking really, really tired if you're lucky.

Good luck, Matt! I may very well see you in DEN! Give me a call when you land.:)

In the words of Mortal Kombat...
 

...round 2, FIGHT!

No, actually everything has been fine so far. I got out of my hotel on-schedule at about 5:35. I actually met an MCI skycap coming down in the elevator and gave him a ride to the airport. Funny guy -- very grateful for the ride but he still refused to put on his seatbelt.

MCI is quiet at the moment. I walked right through security, being the only person there most of the time. The girl who came over to hand me a bin and give the "laptops, shoes, liquids, drop-your-shorts" lecture was cute so I gave her some of the chocolate I brought for service-bribes :D

The GA who reprinted my boarding passes (screw the online chicken ones, I want those cards!) said he knows a couple of regular customers who check in online then get him to reprint their passes so they can keep the cards. Great minds think alike, eh?

Anyway, I've got my favorite spot to sit on the floor and hotrod off RCC T-Mo internet, so I'll post another update from Denver.

Good luck!
 

There's a number of us FT MRers on UA 930 SFO-LHR on 12/9-12/10 arriving 6:55am, so if you're on 918, we should meet up at the RCC.

I hope Lucky is right about the 1K life! :p

What beats me is that you guys can get these flights so cheaply. One LHR_LAX return flight on UA wil cost about £470 = $930.

I need to get a US credit card to get these prices I think.

/E

Ps. Good luck!

What is killing transats for us Europeans compared to Americans is the low USD / high Euro/Pound.

US carriers aren't (that) stupid, they from here they are basing their pricing on the local currency rather than on the US dollar. This has led to way higher prices for Europeans compared to Americans. Also if you compare prices from last year to this year most of the carriers have increased prices by £50ish for UK-West Coast, despite not much change on year-to-year oil prices.

Actually I was thinking that this works in our favour in some cases. I'm heading over to Vegas soon, and do so fairly regularly, what im thinking is that whilst I'm over there is do some MR's (if i decide to join mileage plus 0luckycoins' arcane knowledge might persuade me...). In that case the weak dollar makes life even more interesting....

But yes, its a pain being stuck in europe....

Funny I was thinking of doing the same also. :D Except picking an east coast and shuttling over to the west coast. Except I'd be doing MRs mostly on NW.

The bummer is really see fares for UK-US that start around 550USD when they are usually quite a bit lower than that. :(

Let's see. Where did I leave off?

After camping out at my favorite spot in DEN -- the floor next to the phone bank to the right of the entrance to RCC West, where I can hotrod on the RCC's T-Mo wifi service -- I proceeded to my gate and took in the sights. Namely, 10 or 15 hothothot German girls (the DEN-IAD flight continued on to Munich). Not sure why people so close to the Swiss Alps would fly to Denver to go skiiing (most of them had ski/board boots with them), but I certainly didn't mind the eye candy.

The flight was on a 777 (the trans-atlantic config) and I somehow managed to grab seat 21J. Seatguru doesn't do that seat justice. More leg room than an exit row without the prodtruding handles to get in the way of sleeping against the wall... now none of you steal it from me! Interesting bit of in-flight drama: the guy sitting next to me accidentally left his wedding ring on the counter in the bathroom but realized it almost immediately after the next guy had gone in. He waited off to the side for the bathroom guy to come out. When he finally did, he looked inside the bathroom but didn't see the ring. By this point, the guy who had gone in after him had already sat back down -- my seatmate approached him and asked him if he had his ring. "Oh! Uh... I was going to turn it in at the end of the flight," as he digs it out of his pocket. More inexplicable drama brewed, including but not limited to whispering among my entire row and the theif's entire row about what had happened, an FA coming over to apologize, and the thief jumping up and being the first guy off the plane...

Having just over two hours in IAD, I did significantly more exploring than on the last MR. For example, I discovered that IAD is just like SJC, except huge, more dense and ugly. So basically they took the small-airport structure and charm and completely messed it up. RCC wifi camping worked as usual, though I think they were having connectivity problems...

There was some amazing gate lice during boarding for the IAD-LHR leg. One would think a third of the flight would've been elite and therefore holding Area 1 BPs, and it did in fact appear that way, but we all eventually discovered that it was a combination of people trying to go to Sacramento crowding the wrong gate (not sure how that happened) and really bad gate lice. Either way, we made it aboard and got established.

The flight itself was completely unremarkable. I watched Miami Vice, which I had been looking forward to seeing and was disappointed by. I sat next to a nice Indian guy who was connecting to Jet Air in LHR. We both work in tech outsourcing (suprise!). Service was exceptionally prompt -- someone, somehow delivered my hot water while I was watching Miami Vice without my even noticing. Aside from that, however, there was nothing special or interesting about the journey. And yes, Lucky, you're right. AB/HJ seats are better. Oops.

Ok. Bed time. I was going to write more but I'll have to finish it tomorrow. My head hurts.

Thanks for all your help, everyone.

Sounds fun! Now rinse, lather, and repeat!:D

On your advice, I checked out the wine bar called "Vino Volo" IIRC. I thought it was excellent, especially for an airport. They had a wide variety of wines in all varietals and prices and some very good tapas to go with them. They offered wines by the glass, bottle, or in tasting flights.

There is also a decent (for an airport mind you) Japanese place over in terminal B. Terminal B is usually very quiet and the nicest terminal at IAD IMO. Terminal C where Vino Volo is, OTOH, is a nightmare although it does have the international 1st lounge.

I second that!! ^
I have to admit I was getting flight-lust reading about those MRs. Wowie.

Trip report, part 3
 

"Let there be flight"

Moving on. Does anyone know how long the walk is from the gate, through the "Transit Lane" to where we go back through security? Cuz I'm a fast walker and that took at least 12 minutes. That's a full kilometer!

Following the walk of pain, including the panicked reactions by all the Americans who were simply connecting in London and didn't know about the one carry-on limit in the UK, I stumbled into the brightly lit terminal C and checked-in.

After handing him my itinerary print-out so he could pull up my outbound flights, the nice guy at the United desk didn't notice that I had only been in LHR for an hour and happily offered to try to find me a better routing back to Kansas City than LHR-IAD-STL-DEN-MCI. I said I would love an LHR-IAD-DEN-MCI (as mentioned earlier, the mileage cost of this rerouting would've been 14 miles :-P) but alas, we couldn't make it work.

The shopping mall-cum-waiting terminal was beautiful and fun and I loved it, though I'm still upset that I couldn't figure out how to log in to UK's T-Mo wifi access. After poking around the electronics shop (too expensive, even without taxes) and DVD store (too bad it's all in PAL -- they have some movies that haven't come out in the US yet), I got some coffee (Starbucks!!!) and waited. Not having slept on the outbound, my brain was slowly eating itself until I could barely comprehend human language. Eventually the board changed indicating gate number and I made my way down.

Inside the "boarding room" or whatever they call that mini-terminal thing, I spent some time looking out the dark, rain covered window at the 767 I was waiting to board. It was nice scenery so I pulled out my cellphone and took some pictures through the window. Then I turned the camera on myself for some promised "I'm really tired" shots. A security minion came over at this point and demanded I delete the pictures and shut off my camera. I did ;-) .

SO HERE'S THE BEST PART OF THE TRIP. The LHR-IAD on a 767 was, like, 40% full. EVERY E+ GROUPING (12AB, CDE, FG) HAD ONLY ONE PERSON! w00t!

I don't have much of a trip report for this leg as I managed to sleep for most of it. I met djerikd on board, who had PMed me about meeting up on this leg. We both pretty much went to sleep right away, but it was cool to meet another FTer. I had an absolutely delightful FA (for the two times I was awake to notice her) who smiled and was just generally very plesant. Then the flight was over and it was time to leave!

Customs was easy. Didn't ask me anything. Take-card-ask-again-about-food guy asked how long I had been in LHR. I told him the truth and that it was an MR. He laughed and sent me on my way. Ejerikd was waiting outside with an offer to get me into the RCC (thank you!!!) but unfortunately my connection was only 40 minutes and required a turtle ride from C to A terminals, so I had to jet (har).

Things get increasingly hazy at this point, as my mind was shutting down and moving into "just get through it" mode. The UniExpress flight to STL was interesting: very open seating, decent plane, funny captain, but MISERABLE FA. It was operated by Trans States or something. She glowered at everyone, never made eye contact, ignored my questions and generally avoiding providing any service beyond going through with drinks once and a trash bag once. When I walked to the front of the cabin to ask her if I could please oh please be allowed to throw away my trash she hadn't bothered to pick up, she sent me to the back of the plane: "there's a trash can in the bathroom!" Byotch.

Here a problem emerged: I had gate-checked my bag. As I was waking up, they said something about bringing the gate-checked bags inside so no one would slip and fall. Fine. Whatever. Well, it turns out they unloaded the gate-checked bags along with the checked bags and sent them all to the baggage claim. Thaaaanks UA. I got the help of a very nice GA who sorted it out and had a ground worker go to baggage, find my roller and bring it around security for me. Thanks UA!

I really don't have anything more to say about this trip. There was a hothothot "GoJet/UniExpress" FA doing an NRSA in the row behind me going STL-DEN, then I managed to get on an earlier, if far more full flight to MCI before finally making it out. The end.

Morals/Lessons:
1. Talk to hot girls on planes. They have nowhere to run!
2. SmartWool socks have god-like powers. Wore em for two days straight and have never had warmer, cozier or LESS SMELLY feet in my life.
3. Roll-a-boards are bad carry-ons but good airport bags.
4. Give FAs the chocolate at some point BEFORE the end of the flight.
5. Be prepared to walk at least 17 miles in LHR.
6. Talk to hot Indian-British girls in the airport. They don't have far to run.
7. 767s are actually pretty nice.
8. Bring mints.

The actual end.