Sunday, April 18, 2010

Volcano interruption

Now interrupting your regularly scheduled Egypt & Jordan broadcast......

Well, as we suspected the second leg of our flight was indeed cancelled due to England airspace still being closed from the volcanic fallout.  Our flights were supposed to be from Amman to Istanbul, then Istanbul to London (Heathrow).  So, we changed our flight with Turkish Air this morning at 3:30am (before we got in a taxi to go to the airport...because we woke up to find our second flight canceled and wanted to deal with it immediately).  The only real option for us was to accept a flight to Birmingham, just northwest of London....but the catch is that this flight is not until NEXT Sunday!  Yep...a whole week.  They said it would be the end of the month before they could fly us to London.  But the 25th nearly is the end of the month already!  Yikes.

So, we got to Istanbul quite simply, jumped on the wifi in the airport once we got there....did some hotel searching, got a map from the tourist help desk and we have scored an awesome hotel with a view of the Blue Mosque for super cheap.  The room is amazing!  A mosaic on the wall, wood floors, nice plush linens, lovely bathroom and even slippers and two pieces of turkish delight on the bed!  We've started on a good foot in this bad situation!

Now, we are off to scour the internet to figure out our next move.  Any suggestions?  Do we wait it out or try to go overland?  A website suggesting a rail route from Istanbul to London says it takes 4 days if you don't really stop to tour...but that route also includes the Eurostar which we already know is an impossibility.  Swim the channel?  :) 

1 comment:

  1. good luck.

    You know we're watching with great interest, since my dad and I are supposed to be in London on the 13th... Hopefully all four of us will be there by then! -hal

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