Euro Day 23 - Bump in the Night

The best thing to do when you go to a late movie and get to bed at 1 AM is to get up at 6 AM and go for a run through Regents park -  highly recommended.  It was a beautiful morning and a nice run with the exception of the aforementioned birds hanging around the pond like vagrants.

The rest of the morning was consumed with packing and debating.  The debate was centered around the relative merits of getting bumped from our flight and potentially getting home a day later.  The airline (Norwegian) air had notified me via text that the flight was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to take another flight for a compensation of 200 euro.  That compensation had subsequenty increased to 400 euro.   We had a few different camps taking various viewpoints.  In one camp was Brett who was absolutely in favor of taking the money and spending another day in London.  I was on the other extreme - as I had to get back to work on Monday.  The rest were in the conflicted middle - as there would be additional hassles associated with spending another day in London (accommodations, luggage, etc).  In the end we decide to play it by ear and show up to the airport and see what happens.

We left a little extra time to get to the airport due to Kelsey's sore back.   Our Airbnb location proved valuable again - as we were able to hop a train from the station right down the street out to Gatwick airport.  Since we did not have a table to pass the time playing cards the troops were reduced to thumb wrestling.

We got to the airport to check-in and the agent told me that they did not think they still needed volunteers but would take our name down in case anything changed.  When they got to the gate we heard our name being called over the speaker.   At this point we had come to a family consensus where the 4 were on board with staying as long as the airline set them up in a hotel near the airport to make logistics as easy as possible.  When I approached the desk, they informed me that they were looking for 5 volunteers.  They would provide each us $500 euro compensation and they would put us on a British Air flight leaving Heathrow in 3 hours !  Bingo !   So they put us in a taxi and we headed to Heathrow (an hour away).   We arrived with no issues and had plenty of time to spare - as the flight was delayed 30 minutes.  The only significant downside of this scheme was we lost our exit row seats on our original flight and stuck in middle seats on the new flight.  The flight was delayed another 20 minutes when they could not extract the stairs from the plane and we ended up getting to Logan at 11:15 - 4 hours after our original plan.  We booked an Uber XL for the ride home and our awesome EurO adventure ended just before 1AM.