A welcome sight!

Monday
We should have been here waiting for our flight to Manchester England yesterday evening, however things didn’t work out right! We were due to fly out of Cincinnati airport to Atlanta GA at about 1.15 pm yesterday. With various delays and cancellations the last day or so due to the global tech outage, Roger had checked the flights first thing this morning, and though the first flight of the day had been cancelled, the rest were showing on time. However, just as we were approaching the airport, I got a text, saying the flight was delayed an hour. We always allow a decent margin for connections, so at that point we weren’t unduly worried. We had some lunch, during which we received notification of further delay. In the end, we finally left at 6.45! We knew the Virgin flight had left 90 minutes late yesterday, so Roger still had some hope, whereas I was pretty sure we’d had it, and sure enough by the time we landed the Virgin flight had already taken off. We made enquiries at the gate desk, but she referred us to Customer service at Gate 11. When we got there, the line extended all the way to Gate 18. We realised waiting there was going to take literally hours. Atlanta is Delta’s chief hub, and this was obviously a nationwide problem. When they have to cancel flights like they did when the software problem hit, they end up with planes and crews in the wrong places, so it takes several days to get back to normal. Fortunately, our daughter Jen lives in Atlanta, about 20 minutes from the airport, so they came to pick us up for the night, and Roger tried getting through to Delta by phone and online - the booking was made through Delta as they are partners with Virgin. In the end the recorded message gave him the option for them to call him back when they got to his place in line which would be in approximately 4 hours! In actual fact they did call him back, but it was 9 hours later, not 4, by which time Jason was driving us back to the airport, to try and talk to an actual person! Fortunately, they were able to get us on this evenings flight at 6.30, so Jason kindly drove us back to their home so we could spend a few hours there, rather than spending all day at the airport! He went off to the gym for an hour or so, while R took care of other things such as calling his Dad, and rescheduling the rental car in Manchester! When he got back we went out for lunch together - Jen was at work - then he returned us to the airport in good time - the check in desks weren’t even open yet, but we wanted to play it safe. As it happened everything went smoothly and there wasn’t a long line for security. So the sight of our plane pulling in to the gate was a very welcome sight!
Although I’m posting this a couple of days late, I’m still tagging it for Mono Monday, the theme being the number 4, as our gate was F4!