The Quest: Snow to Thames and Back

In the epic Arthurian quests of old, the goal was not primarily the destination, but the journey, the refining of the soul that happens as the heat of adversity, detours, and distractions burn away the dross and leaves behind a purer metal.

Last week was a quest of Arthurian scale, recast in modern times. While I strove to keep the length of this blog less epic than the scale of the adventure it tells, I both petition your reading endurance, and invite you along for this most curious of journeys.

It all began with a seemingly innocuous goal: getting to London for a 3-day business meeting marathon.

Chapter 1: The Home Front

Leaving an 8 month old and 2 ½ year old isn’t the easiest of tasks, but with sufficient prior planning can be accomplished. Having lined up my husband and mom to help cover everything while I was out, we hit Snag #1 when the Thursday before my Monday departure my husband threw out his back. Not a “I have a slight twinge when I do a back handspring” but a “lying flat on the office parking lot asphalt because my back has frozen and I can’t move” sort of throwing out. Obviously this means no lifting kids. Obviously this is therefore a problem when said young kids require constant lifting for diaper changes, carseats, and cribs. Solution: Move husband and kids to my parents’ house for the weekend in preparation for Snag #2: snowzilla.

The snow is falling...

Richmond occasionally gets snow, and its predicted coming creates a frenzied atmosphere in grocery and hardware stores where shelves are pillaged of bread, milk, shovels, and sleds. To those in the northeast and Midwest, this curious stampeding for staples is a strange but rather endearing oddity; for those who experience Richmond snow – and the phenomenon that is roads untouched by a plow for many days – the phenomenon is less appealing. The city got 14-16 inches over the weekend, one of our largest snowfalls in memory. This would be a welcome chance to hunker down inside (for a short period at least – more than 72 hours cooped up with a baby and toddler will cause even the sturdiest of souls to adopt a twitch), except for said requirement of actually getting out of Richmond in order to land in London. This leads to:

and falling... and falling...

Chapter 2: The Journey

Initial plan status: straightforward. Drive from parents’ house to my house to get passport. Drive from my house downtown to meet colleague (Kathryn). Drive together in rental car to flight out of Dulles. Snowzilla means that only one runway is operating, but google claims our flight is on time, so plans proceed.

Snag #3: Approximately 100 feet out of parents’ driveway, I get stuck. Like, stuck stuck. Shovel the tires, get help from passerby good Samaritans stuck. We finally dig out, I go another 200 feet and get stuck again. Repeat process with shoveling, pushing, and good Samaritans. Go another 200 feet and get stuck a third time. Decide this is for the birds, utilize more shoveling, pushing, and good Samaritans to try to get car back into said driveway where everything started 60 sweaty minutes ago. Call Kathryn and ask her husband to come pick me up in their 4 wheel drive truck.

Snag #4: Arrive in said 4 wheel drive truck at my house (30 mins away) and realize that I have forgotten my house key. Imagine banging my head repeatedly against side of 4 wheel drive truck. Tromp around house trying to figure out if we have a window or door unlocked – which of course we do not. Happily (in an odd way), Kathryn’s husband announces that if I can find a metal coat hanger, he can easily pop the latch on our garage door to get it open. While this permanently undermines my sense of safety (we now lock the door between the house and the garage), I beg a coat hanger from our neighbors (who are very confused but comply), and pop! We’re in the house.

Finally! My jeans are wet from shin-high snow, I’m sweaty from shoveling, my socks are damp, but I have my passport and I’m in a moving vehicle. Things must start to go our way, right?

Snag #5: Kathryn and I meet at her house, and after getting the rental car unstuck a time or two (thank the Lord for the profusion of good Samaritans around the city), we begin the 2 hour drive up to Dulles Airport. We stop an hour later at  Wawa to get lunch, only to have another helpful passerby point out, “Oh, did you notice your front tire is basically flat?” Why no, we had not. Thank you, Wawa, for free air – though having an air pump with a pressure gauge that actually worked would have been marginally more helpful. We fill up the tire until it looks even-ish with the other ones, hit the road again.

Guesstimating tire pressure...

Snag #6: An hour and 40 minutes into our drive to Dulles, I applaud Kathryn on having a husband so handy in a pinch, since otherwise my passport would be stranded inside my house, and she turns to me with a stricken look and says “Passport. I forgot my passport.” Surely she’s joking, I think. But she is not. She calls her husband (who is watching their 6 small kids), he gets her passport, hops in the car and starts driving towards us. With absolutely no traffic, he MIGHT make it in time for us to get our flight. We decide to try. After dropping off our rental car (and waiting for a new shuttle bus when the first one got stuck in the snow), I go through security and wait at the gate. Kathryn hovers, waiting for her husband’s passport delivery.

Stuck in the snow...

Thanks to her sprained ankle boot, they let her go through the (line-less) handicapped security line, and she arrives at the gate with literally moments to spare. I check the mirror and find out that while I suspect my hair has gone completely gray, it is in fact – surprisingly – still brown.

Snag #7: Having boarded the plan, we sit on the runway and I see Kathryn looking at Air BnB postings in London. Since we were both so sure that the plane would never leave (Dulles only had one of four runways open, most flights were cancelled), we hadn’t booked a place to stay. You know, for when we landed. In 7 hours. Kathryn clicks the “book” button, we pray the owner will check her Airbnb messages before we land at 6am and away we go.

Landing in London 7 hours later, still wearing damp socks, we breathe deeply the London air, take a sigh of relief to note the Airbnb owner accepted our booking, stop by British Airways lost and found to retrieve the coat Kathryn left on the plane, and finally make it to Clapham, our corner of London.

Fast forward through 3 days of packed meetings…

Brief London sighting going into breakfast...

Somewhat brain-dead from a packed few days of meeting marathons, Kathryn & I trundle into an Uber to head to the airport. Having flown out on British Airways, we go back to the BA terminal, go to check in and realize simultaneously A) we were actually on American Airlines going home (wrong terminal) and B) Kathryn’s phone fell out in the Uber car. By using airport wifi to Skype the Uber car driver from the airport lobby via Kathryn's laptop (since my phone won't connect) we get Uber guy to agree to come back. And we then hop on the London Underground to (eventually) get to the right terminal. Since the Uber guy can't drive us unless we book him on the app which we can't connect to anyway since we're standing outside without Wifi. Right.

True to stereotype, the American plane is basically a flying tin can from circa 1980. Each seat does have a screen, but there are no on-demand movies, just a couple looping options that sporadically stutter, start over, or randomly turn off. Since we are alive and on a moving vehicle, we take this in stride.

Landing in New York at 9PM (2 am body clock time for us), it becomes quickly apparent that we are late enough to miss our connection. This is an issue A) because it was the last flight out, and we’re now stuck overnight in the purgatory-like ambiance that is JFK airport and B) because Kathryn had her son’s birthday party and daughter’s school party the next morning she needed to get back to. We consider taking an Amtrak train, renting a car, or taking the Chinatown cheap-o bus, none of which work out – for a variety of reasons I will spare you the details of.

Fine. Having gotten through and survived to Snag # 8,342,174, this can’t daunt us. Except we’re exhausted. And JFK airport is like a third world country. And right before our flight, a flight to Buenos Aires got cancelled, which means that there are 2 people at the American Airlines rebooking desk and (literally) 235 people in front of us, all of which need rebooking and hotel/meal vouchers, and many of which speak little English and are a mixture of confused, incredulous, and angry. Rather like us, except by this point we are too zombie-like to be angry and instead just stare into space with glazed expressions, shuffling forward with the line in beleaguered silence.

While we wait 90 minutes in the interminable hotel voucher line, I call American Airlines customer service and spill said sob story about kiddos to convince them to rebook us from Dulles to a direct Richmond flight. 30 minutes of supervisor bounce-around later, they agree. Except JFK doesn’t fly direct to Richmond. Ok… having lived in NYC 5 years, I know American flies direct La Guardia to Richmond, can we do that? [Cue additional supervisor discussion]. Ok, yes. And American will cover the hotel and the car over to La Guardia. Great.

Vouchers in hand, we ride from JFK to the La Guardia Comfort Inn (another bastion of purgatory-like ambiance, though with a shower and clean bed, we could care less), when I realize I need to find 8 AA batteries because the breastmilk pump I’d been toting along has died. And it’s midnight. In a sketchy part of Queens. Of course La Guardia Comfort Inn does not have a store, nor does the desk have batteries, but the desk guy informs me there’s a 24 hour gas station a couple blocks down I could walk to. While walking alone at midnight near La Guardia airport likely isn’t the smartest move, at this point I’m fully convinced it is statistically impossible for anything else to go wrong on this trip. I jog there and back, arrive safely, and pass “just” one possible drug deal in process. Success.

The next morning, we get into the La Guardia terminal, only to hear from the gate agent that there “may be possible mechanical failure” and that the crew is “checking it out.” Happily (I guess?) they decide there is not mechanical failure, we board 30 mins late, and finally land in Richmond. Exhausted, elated, befuddled, we finally make it home, down coffee, and lay to rest the Epic London Quest of 2016.

Like any true Quest, morals were realized along the way – the help of good Samaritans, the assistance of spouses and grandparents, the benefits of perseverance. And like any true Quest we emerged at the end with a more nuanced perspective on life. But all the same, it was awfully nice to get home.