Today has been an exercise in patience. The Bechtels say that they have a saying in Mombasa, “if it drizzles in the morning, nothing goes well”. Well, it drizzled as we were waiting for our ride to the airport, and our experience was that the saying is true. When we got to the airport, we were informed that they had oversold our flight to Nairobi, and we were being bumped. No amount of pleading changed their mind, even though it meant we were not going to make our connection to London.
Right after our flight left for Nairobi (the one we weren’t on), the airline went on strike. The flight we had been put on (at 10:15) was now in question. Finally, after a “breakfast/light refreshment” (which was our compensation from Kenyan Airways - picture above w/coke - great breakfast!) and much waiting with many people who were very upset, a plane came into Mombasa that actually had a partial flight crew, so we could fly to Nairobi. Once we got to Nairobi, we were informed by “passport control” that we would not be flying to London. However, the airline wouldn’t change us to another flight because they didn’t have confirmation about whether our evening flight at midnight was going to go or not.
We spent many hours in the airport waiting to see if we would be able to fly through the night or not. We were a little sad, since we had a non-refundable hotel and bus tour awaiting us in London, and we only had one day to see all of London in the first place. After watching many people wait for their flights only to have them cancelled, it was our turn to begin the check-in process. We went through the final security check, and then sat and watched our plane being readied. The only problem was that there was no crew. We almost did the happy dance (if we hadn’t been so tired) when we saw pilots arrive. Our plane did finally take off around 1:30am. It was not the day we had planned, but it certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been.