OFF TO ENGLAND
We were up at 5:30, finally packing the little we need for two weeks away. Susie was still anxious that she wouldn’t be allowed on the plane without her ETA visa for the United Kingdom. I was still irritated that when I googled British ETA a week earlier and the forms came up for applying for the ETA which I filled out and paid for without thinking, that I had been led to an Evisa website that charged $100 to service getting the ETA with $20 for the ETA while the official UK website that Susie used charged only $20 but was slow. But then when I looked over airline information for the boarding pass that Susie’s return ticket was for the 19th while mine was for the 28th, our intended return date. Further panic. Our cheap basic tickets are non refundable, non changeable, no seat choices, no options at all. So I didn’t know how much more I would have to pay for Susie’s ticket change, or if I even could.
So off we raced to Knoxville, needing to get to the airport early to try and change the ticket. But we got off late, got caught in a pouring rain storm with bumper to bumper traffic and and barely got to Maryville in time to leave our car at the home of Kathy’s mother and stepfather before being driven to the nearby Knoxville Airport.
Once dropped off and through the line what still seems to me a major miracle happened. The agent, who said he had been a performing arts major in college, with this the only job he could get, was smart enough to be able to deal with our ticket. He not only changed the date of Susie’s ticket at no charge but arranged for us to get seats side by side on the way back. And it turned out that after all the threats that the UK was not able to process the ETA’s so that it didn’t matter that Susie’s hadn’t arrived and that that the extra $100 I had paid for mine was wasted money.
We flew to Atlanta. I was ferried around in an electric cart through customs to our gate, then we flew to JFK airport in New York where we had four hours to walk around and take photographs, before settling in with aisle seats for our seven hour flight to England.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 