Part three of Mishaps In L.A.

Following an interesting week in the states (Dating a lap dancer and being thrown out of a Las Vegas casino to name but a few), it was time to come home. Our journey back would take us via a change at Newark airport (In New York). Due to having booked the flight separate to the rest of the folks I was with, I found myself with three seats all to myself. Just as I was thinking the flight back would be somewhat more spacious, one of the flight attendants came over and asked if it would be ok if they seated someone on the isle seat. Well of course I said it would be fine, and so a few minutes later she came back with an old lady in a wheel chair, helped her in the seat and left us.

The elderly lady didn’t say or do much for the whole flight, and when we were coming in to land the flight attendant returned and informed me that because of the wheelchair they would take the lady off after all the passengers had departed. Great I thought, and hoped my mates would have the decency to wait for me once they got off.

We landed, everyone rushed off, they wheeled the elderly lady away and I made my way. No sign of them as I left the plane. No sign of them as I headed through the maze of corridors as I quickly followed the signs to the luggage collection. You see I remembered that when we landed here on our way to Los Angeles, we did not have much time between collecting our luggage, transferring it across to the new plane and getting onboard. And believing my mates would possibly be thinking the same, they were probably waiting to collect our luggage.

I got to the luggage carousel, spotted several of the people on our flight, but still no mates. I was starting to wonder where they could have got to, but convinced myself that we had probably missed each other and they were waiting for me back near the plane. Get the bags I thought, and then find them. So I waited. The flight’s bags started coming out, but no sign of any of our bags. Finally they stopped coming and no sign of our luggage. Now I was getting worried. No mates, no bags, was I suppose to be here? I decided to ask an airport supervisor. And here came just what I didn’t want to hear. “Oh you don’t collect your bags if you’re transferring flights”. What! But I collected them coming from the UK! I found out later that if you are coming from outside the US, you collect your luggage yourself and check it in again onto the transferring flight. But if you are coming from within the US to outside this is done automatically for you. Now they tell me.

So I checked my boarding card to see which gate I should head for, and saw to my horror that my flight was due to leave in about 5 minutes. I began to run. Now one thing I forgot to mention, at this point it is about eleven in the evening. In my earlier rush to get to the luggage collection I had passed through security, so I now needed to get back through. The only thing was, they had closed virtually all of them apart from a few at the furthest point to where I was. Typical! So I ran down to there, got through, ran back up the other side and along the corridor to the appropriate gate. I arrived to a deserted gate and a plane heading for the runway.

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