Kristin was due in the following Monday morning at 8:30, Heathrow, terminal 5. The video cam and I were there at 8:15, jittery from an amalgamation of excitement to see her, husbandly concern that she and her retinue of bags would make it through immigration hassle-free and the unrelenting hangover tormenting me from my three day Bavarian binder.
The arrivals hall at terminal 5 is, well, a bit chaotic. Hundreds of disinterested taxi drivers standing around in random gaggles spread without rhyme or reason throughout the hall, holding tilting signs with passenger’s last names, greet you as you enter the United Kingdom. (Roaming the massive hall, intruding on said random gaggles’ conversations in an effort to read each passenger name in search of your own is an adventure in itself.) I was there right at the front of the hall, video cam live, as I prepped to record Kristin’s triumphant entrance to her new kingdom.
However, 9:00 rolled around and still no sign of Kristin. I turned and read through one of the information screens, which indicated passing through customs can take up to one hour from a plane’s landing.
Well, 9:30 came and went and still no sign of Kristin. At this point, my hangover enhanced OCD got the best of me and I queried the taxi driver next to me about how long it usually takes passengers to exit arrivals after landing. Bad idea. “Never takes more than an hour unless somebody is held up in immigration,” is what came out of this gentleman’s mouth in a Scottish accent. Oh shit.
At 9:45, an hour and fifteen minutes after Kristin’s plane had landed, I had managed to find the taxi driver I hired to take us into the city, but Kristin was still merely an apparition, floating somewhere in the white space between two countries. I instructed this good natured cab driver from Bangladesh to go find an airport representative and inquire whether all bags had been collected from the flight from Houston; I was reluctant to leave my post near the door for fear of missing Kristin since she did not have a working phone.
The minutes were beginning to feel like hours at this point as visions of a teary-eyed Kristin, sweating under a heat lamp and answering questions from a British border officer tormented my mind. The cabbie returned ten minutes later with the intel that all bags had been claimed from the Houston flight. Great. It was now a foregone conclusion, in my head, that Kristin was currently being tortured for the procurement of secrets of the State.
Time to act. For the second time in a quarter of an hour, I was issuing military style instructions to this unsuspecting cab driver; “I am leaving to go figure this out. If a pretty blond girl with five or six bags walks through those doors looking like she has no idea where to go, stop her and tell her ‘welcome to the UK Mrs. Hill, your husband will be here shortly.”
And with that I bolted from my post towards the British Airways desk, where upon arrival was informed that the customs line was a two hour wait due to a high concentration of flights recently landed and that I should probably try to relax a little bit. Realizing that I had just provided one more slice of empirical proof in support of Disraeli’s hypothesis that “What we anticipate seldom occurs,” I strolled back toward the arrivals entrance only to see my beautiful wife and new best friend, the trusty taxi driver, come strolling up to me.
I have to say, the disappointment from the loss of the opportunity to record Kristin coming through customs was overwhelmingly outweighed by the joy of hearing her surprise and astonishment when a random taxi driver tapped her on her shoulder and recited to her exactly what I had asked him to! Three cheers for good men.
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