We’ve been trying to upgrade our flight all week with British and running into issues online. After forty five minutes on the phone, they told us they can’t honor the online price and wanted to charge us £1600. Figured we’d take our chances as the airport.

When we got here we learned not only are there no upgrades, there’s no change of changing our seats. So we have two middle seats on a 777 for over eight hours.

I was mad about how British Airways had technical systems that kept offering us upgrades for reasonable prices that didn’t exist. But now I’m just frustrated that it would take an astronomical amount of money beforehand to make the trip comfortable. On our flight out, I could not even fit an 11” iPad on my tray with the person in front of me fully reclined.

All of this came after our morning plans being thrown for a loop because the Elizabeth Line is not running. We chose our second hotel in part for its proximity to the Elizabeth line, making it easy for us to get to the airport in a timely fashion so we could have a relaxed morning. Our alternative options involved walking a half mile and a transfer— too much on a beautiful, but hot and sunny day with our bags. And, because it would have involved taking the Heathrow Express, the cost was higher than a cab.

So we got an Uber, a Model 3, which is not that comfortable, and no AC running. He then proceeded to circle SoHo in a bizarre way and take the objectively longest route any of our mapping programs could figure to get here.

We still have plenty of time and everything is going to be fine, but overall not an ideal travel day when I didn’t take the remainder of the week off from work.