Our day did not go altogether to plan. Bruce received a message from British Airways at 7:00am, telling him that our flight to London this evening had been cancelled because they didn't have an available aircraft and that they had taken the liberty of rebooking us on a flight in 3 days time (Saturday). The plane we were meant to fly in was an Airbus A380 and the Saturday flight was also an A380. For a few moments, we considered staying on for the next flight, but then we decided that it was just as likely that they could cancel that flight too at short notice. We phoned BA to see if we could fly home today with a different airline or route. This wasn't an easy mission, but we did eventually secure a route home this evening, flying with United Airlines to Chicago and changing planes there for a direct flight with BA to London. Bruce was a little concerned that the transfer time at Chicago was only 1 hour and 10 minutes, but he was told that their "guidelines" stated that 55 minutes was the minimum connection time and that we would be fine. More... (much more...) about that later!

Right now, we put that little distraction to one side. We had promised ourselves a relaxing morning (with breakfast back at the Landwer Cafe, of course) before we were to due to meet our friends at 11:30am. Peter and Karen drove from their home to our hotel and at the appointed time, we met them in the foyer. They told us that they were treating us to a visit to the top of the Prudential Tower, next to our hotel, where there is a restaurant with really good views of the city. We were in for a real treat!

We were lucky that there were very few people with the same idea as us and it wasn't long before we were being whisked up to the viewing area in a very fast lift.

The John Hancock Tower tends to dominate, but it is very impressive.

Geoff and Peter's friendship is long-standing. They met on a holiday in Derbyshire in 1971 (when Geoff was 18) and they became firm friends. Although they haven't seen one another too often in recent years, they kept in touch and Geoff had very much been looking forward to seeing him and his wife, Karen, once again. Bruce had only met Peter a few times, most memorably when, in 2014, he drove us both in his car for a comprehensive, full-day tour of (what seemed to be, but probably wasn't) the entirety of his home country, the Netherlands. Bruce had never met Karen before today and was really please to meet her at last.

After landing on schedule at O'Hare International Airport, things went downhill. Below is a playback of our actual flight. We landed at what appears to be the most remote runway and then did a ground tour of the airport. Just before we were about to turn right for the final approach to our assigned stand, we stopped dead. An announcement informed us that there was an aircraft still parked at the stand and that its departure had being delayed until further notice. As we were now blocking the taxiway, we had to move on to the "de-icing" area (where the kink is, bottom left). Once there, we stopped again and waited... and waited. By the time we were able to move to our stand and disembark, we had less than 30 minutes to spare before our British Airways flight was due to depart.

We decided to make a dash for it and raced along seemingly endless corridors across the airport from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3. As we finally saw the British Airways gate, the staff could see us running towards them. They called out our names and seemed happy to see us because we were the last 2 passengers to board. Unfortunately United Airlines, who had issued our boarding passes for the entire journey had decided that we wouldn’t make the connection and had cancelled the BA connection. The BA staff tried their utmost to resolve the problem and to allow us to board but the computer was saying no and the flight despatcher gave them 3 minutes to sort it out, which they couldn’t do, so he closed the doors and we watched as the plane left without us.

The BA staff were really apologetic and walked us over to a nearby American Airlines desk which was just starting to board their flight to Heathrow. They said they couldn’t accept us either because nobody knew where our luggage was. Eventually a BA manager phoned them and they agreed to let us on. Phew!