London Calling.

Guess what? Better yet, guess where we are? If you guessed London, then you are absolutely right! Who called it? Eh? Who? Oh, yea. It was me.

Long story short? We made it to London on the El Al flight from the underworld. Children screaming. No personal air vents. Middle section seats with no chance of seeing out a window.

El Al, being so intelligent, left only an hour and a half window from the time we were scheduled to land to the time the new flight was to take off. El Al took off in Tel Aviv very late. By the time we arrived in London, we were 45 mins into our hour and a half window -- and still had to go through security AGAIN. 35 other people were on the El Al flight transferring to the Virgin Atlantic flight. Everyone ran to get there in time. Security's line was packed. There was lots of yelling and chaos. The supervisor who was taking care of our connection broke the "que" and everyone bum-rushed the security. Screaming from the staff insued. Michael and I got sent through immigration because of some duty free items that were not sealed properly while the rest of the others went through. While in immigration, we missed our flight.

I found out later that when the other people who kept going, the second they got to the gate, the doors were closed on them and they, too, missed the flight.

But it gets better. We spoke to Virging Air first and they told us the problem was El Al's fault (of course) and to talk to them. Because we went through immigration, we were seperated from the group and, hence, had to go all over the air port to the departure terminal to talk to El Al. When we reached the kiosk, no one was there. Why, you may ask? Because they were on a break. This was 3:00 London time. El Al wasn't due to open again until 7pm. Yea.
We camped out on the floor in front of the El Al office. We found a really nice lady who worked for them and she was as helpful as she could be, which was actually very nice. However, it was only soothing to our nerves, not to our actual problem. All told, we spent seven hours camped out on the floor in front of the El Al office while they were trying to scramble to place 35 tired, hungry, and slightly irate people in a hotel and a new flight.

Basically, we're never flying El Al again, despite the couple of nice people we dealt with. Any other airline would have taken care of this immediately. There was no reason for any of this to have taken 7 hours, especially when we were through immigration for the last five of the seven hours while everyone esle was stuck trying to attain Visas because of being Israeli citizens. There was no reason for us to be camped out on the floor in front of their office while they ate bananas and everyone else was going through immigration and couldn't be helped anyhow. It was rediculous.
By the time we got to our hotel, it was too late to tour. Seven hours in London was wasted due to stupidity that we could have spent doing something other than staring at luckier people leave the air port.

We have an early morning flight that will, G-d willing, bring us to America. We've got more connections though and are basically spending the next 24 to 48 hours in transit. More details to come. Keep posted.