Finally, the day of our departure. With just over 4 hours of sleep at Clarions hotel Arlanda, our day started off at 03:40 am. Got everything packed and organized tw0 breakfast bags to go from Clarions wide breakfast buffé selection. After localizing British Airways check-in counter, we were able to check-in and were so relieved that ours 2 unaccompanied suitcases would be checked all the way to Grenada.
The flight was completely full. After the doors were securely shut our captain informed us that he was still waiting on confirmation from Heathrow for our landing clearance window. Apparently, the fog over Heathrow resulted in the limiting of aircrafts coming in to land and take off. After just over an hour departure time from of waiting on the tarmac at Arlanda we were finally given confirmation and could start our flight could take off. Håkan and i were now really worried because we had a transit window of 1.5 hours before our next flight to Miami would leave. Our decent towards Heathrow took another half hour delay which now meant that our chances of making our next flight was now very slim….but to our relieve the captain informed us that all passengers connecting to Miami there was a ground representative who would take us directly to the waiting aircraft. So hurriedly took our bags and as soon as we could leave the aircraft, ran towards the entrance terminal where the representative with her Miami placard hurriedly instructed us directions towards which route to follow. We ran all the way to the checkpoint area only to be told that flight AA 207 to Miami had already closed its doors and was on their way out from the gate so we were too late!! We were instructed to join the long queue of passengers waiting in their Customers services area to rebook us on another flight to Miami. As we joined the queue, we were met by other passengers who were ahead of us in the queue and had been on the same flight from Arlanda Stockholm and who had also missed the connecting flight to Miami. We thought it was because we were far behind that that was the reason, we had missed the Miami flight but these passengers had gotten off the aircraft ahead of us and they didn’t make the Miami flight. The BA representative came up to us in the queue to ask us what had happened and we told her what their Checkpoint authorities had said which she found confusing too.
After a long discussion with BA Customer services we were able to get seats in the same Class that we previous had, unfortunately these were really terrible seats but since the flight was full and it was the last flight to Miami on that day, we took the seats. I kept stressing the fact that our unaccompanied luagage needed to be redirected onto our new flight which we were assured had been done.
As we were going onboard we asked Gate personal if there was anyway they could check if infact our luggage had been loaded on our new flight, but they were not able to do so as the luggage hadn’t been loaded completely.
Our seats were right next to the toilets, the flight attendants on board really made our flight pleasant. They were so hands on, friendly, and polite. We arrived at Miami International Airport around 20:45 and went over to baggage claim to find out if our luggage was on our our flight, to which we were told that they couldn’t see but that since our buggage tags stated that they would be checked in all the way to Grenada they should arrive with us.
We joined a new queue for the US immigration and passport check. Where they checked our papers and asked a load of questions then finally we could walk right out and into the country. Which surprised us as we had a 17 hour transit in Miami and thought we needed a special permission to leave the airport, but that was not necessary. It took us a little while to figure out but all we needed was to check-in 3 hours before our flight at Check-in point 3, we were really tired at this stage and decided instead of looking for a hotel at night time in a city we do not know, we would just try to check in to the MIA hotel and get som sleep and be on time to our checkpoint which would be 07:00am.