Final day

For the final day, I didn't really have time to do anything much, so I requested a late checkout at the hotel, intending to leave on the 2pm hotel shuttle, go to Manhattan, have a nice dinner, then go to the airport in plenty of time for my 8pm flight home.  Most of this worked very well.  I dropped in at Rochester's to pick up my new pair of trousers that I had bought to replace a worn-out pair and continued on the subway to Penn Station.  I decided to eat something simple at the TGI Friday's there, before taking the New Jersey Transit to the airport.  It was whilst I was perusing the bill at around 4.40pm, that I thought I'd check the status of my flight, so I got out my itinerary to check the flight number.  That's when I noticed that my flight was actually at 6.40pm, and not 8pm!

Fortunately, a NJT train was just about to leave and I made this train and got on the airtrain to Continental's main terminal: terminal C.  Unfortunately, the check-in process that I had completed the night before hadn't actually checked me in, and having taken ages, well at least 5 minutes, to answer all the questions and options at the check-in, I completed the procedure at 5.41pm exactly - which is exactly 1 minute too late, so they refused to let me on the flight!  I was placed on standby for the following flight, 40 minutes later, with the warning that all the evening's flights to London were over-booked.

So I had to proceed to the gate for the later flight and wait.  I was the only passenger on the standby list, though, so I only needed them to be one person short.  Finally, 15 minutes before departure, the man at the desk beckoned me forward and said that one lady was not travelling after all, so I had a seat!  This turned out to be a good seat (12A) much further forward than the one I had on the original flight (39F), and it was only 40 minutes after the one I was supposed to be catching.  In the end, all the US to UK flights were arriving 45 minutes to an hour earlier than scheduled, so I landed at pretty much the original flight's scheduled time, and the baggage for that flight was still coming around when our baggage was coming out too, so I didn't miss out by very much at all.

My Dad picked me up outside and I went home for dinner, before travelling home to Cambridge on the train in the afternoon, as the engineering works had finished by then.  I didn't sleep on the plane at all, so I was quite tired by the time I got home, and I fell asleep in the armchair, only waking up at after 3am!