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Message: [QUOTE="August_West, post: 4353191, member: 1047"] OK We are going to finish this part 1 leg now. Just keep in mind we aren't at our first destination even yet in this story (Edinburgh), that will be part 2. And man oh man there is a ton to unpack including the wedding. so after learning our bags were gone** we head out to Taxi stand , FREEDOM! Things are now in our control! Overall I love the UK and think they get a ton of things more right than the US. I'm here to tell you a Taxi stand at a major airport is NOT one of them. Its after midnight on a weekday at Heathrow, shouldn't be THAT crazy but ok its an international hub, sure, but the cancellations have sent the curb at that hour into another frenzy. I see that they have a taxi queue. Great. There is some order to this madness, we get into the queue, maybe 75 people long. In NYC that queue is empty in 4 minutes. In Heathrow it took 75? Why?!!!! I quickly learned why. They have a "checker" seating people in the cabs. They only have one checker. And he must set the people in the cab, get their destination address, and then with a handheld scanner like my shipping department uses at work, he has to scan the barcode of the taxi drivers ID. Meanwhile there are literally 40 taxis lined up behind waiting to pickup fares. The process was so asinine it literally hurt my head after all I had been through that day. And people started yelling and guess what? The more they yelled the slower the checker would go intentionally as response. Incredible. So while we are in line we are searching for last minute hotels. Its close to 1AM my GF STILL hasn't eaten, and we know that we need to get out of London in just a few hours and find a train to Edinburgh. So we didn't want to spend much money on a 6 hour hotel. So we booked the Ramada in Hounslow [I]supposedly [/I]just a few miles from Heathrow. And it probably was, but it took 35 minutes and cost 6o pounds. We got there, and I will start part 2 with that. ** you've seen me asterisk mention of my bags a couple times. Obviously we still don't have them. We gave them 3 forwarding addresses, the hotel in Edinburgh (never got there), the Air bnb in Alva (never got here) and my GF house in Dunoon (where we are going tomorrow for remainder of trip) . We have called them every other day since when we have worked up the gumption to try and find out the status. Last time was this morning they give us the same answer they have every other time we've called them in the last week + " we are sorry but we haven't located them yet, do we have your address on file?" The funny (or sad thing) is that in preparation for this we put apple air tags (if you don't know what these are find out and get them if you're a traveler!) in all of our bags and we tell them " the bleeping bag is in the same bleeping place it was on the same bleeping night you bleeped us, its in a warehouse off of heathrow, you want the bleepin' GPS location?" I don't think it will ever get us our bag back but I'm starting to enjoy my every other day BA baggage swear routine. Because they are dumbfounded when I finally break it to them. [/QUOTE]

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