Sunday October 28th

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[09:06]

We spent the night in the Hyatt hotel. Luckily, as we are flying PE they put us up in a nice room in the local hotel, actually in the airport.

However, we didn't get our cases back, so we had to survive on what we had in our carry on bag.

From what we heard yesterday, there was a detector fault in the aircraft which the BA engineers tried 3 hours to resolve with no luck.

Whether we will fly in the same aircraft or a different one is anyone's guess.

According to the email from Virgin, we are now flying on VS116 which is scheduled to fly at 9:35 tonight. So we think we will arrive in the UK somewhere around 10am tomorrow.

Check in is not until around 5pm tonight, so we have until noon to check out of the hotel then 5 hours to kill until check in. Still, at least we got a reasonable breakfast to keep us going.

[14:38]

After breakfast, we popped down to the Virgin Check-in desk to see what was happening. Not a lot at that time.

So we returned to the hotel room and waited there until the room check-out time arrived at noon. After that we went back a second time to the check-in desk, this time there were a couple of other passengers milling about, so we stood and shared what knowledge and stories we'd heard from the previous night. It became apparent that there had been a bad lack of information to everyone on board - some people got hotel rooms in the Hyatt (like us), some were put on a bus to the Florida Mall where there was another set of hotel rooms waiting. Some got vouchers for breakfast, some didn't. Some got email notifications on the new flight details, some got texts, some got nothing and were still oblivious to the new details until there's been over and chatted with us.

The general consensus was that check-in would start around 2pm and as that time approached, a couple of Virgin reps put our flyers saying that the other four Orlando flights to the UK (2xGatwick, 1xManchester and 1xGlasgow) would all have their check-in start time pushed back until 3pm to allow our hold-over flight to get seen to.

2pm arrived and we were second in the queue. We've been given the same seats as before, plus a $15 voucher to spend each on some lunch.

Now we just have a five and a half hour wait to get back on board what we all assume will be the same Jersey Lady aircraft.

[17:37 GMT+1]

$15 was actually quite hard to spend all in one place we found. The food court tends to cater for your $8-$10 area so we both ended up with double of everything!

After that it was a quick freshen up then through security for a second time and on to the gates.

On arrival it didn't look promising...

However, a short time after the above photo was taken, the announcement that the engineers had given the green light was make and once again it was greeted with cheers.

Time ticked on, both the other Gatwick flights left, plus the Manchester and Glasgow flights. Finally (!) at 8:25 we started boarding. Even then we still had 10 people unaccounted for once most were on - just how they could miss a 26 hour countdown I don't know.

We pushed back at 9:45. The captain said we'd be flying south to avoid Hurricane Sandy that's bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard at the moment.

It was good to be back in the air!