London:
Huddled together Thursday morning with hundreds of displaced passengers in a large semiheated tent outside Terminal 1 at Heathrow Airport, Dennis and Bonnie Barlow of Virginia were reviewing the high points of their vacation so far.
First, they cruised the Mediterranean on the Brilliance of the Seas, the ship, now notorious, whose battle with hurricane-force winds and gargantuan waves became worldwide news. Then they decided to spend a relaxing day in London before returning home.
That was Saturday.
"I'm not trying to be negative, but they herded us in here and we have not been able to talk to anyone," Mr. Barlow said of the tent, the latest step in a surreal odyssey in which the couple has tried mightily to find a flight to Washington, despite there being no flights and no information after a snowstorm five days ago. (At this point, there is no longer any snow, either.)
The couple's latest potential flight -- to Frankfurt, from where they hoped to continue on to Washington -- was scheduled to depart in a little over an hour, but passengers had been barred from entering the terminal unless their flights had been confirmed. The Barlows' flight had not been confirmed.
"There aren't too many third world countries that couldn't have done a better job at dealing with this," said Mr. Barlow, who was passing the time reading a book about the football legend Johnny Unitas, as his wife filled in Christmas cards. They had meant to travel with their extended family to Florida this year; that trip has been canceled, and they hope instead to host Christmas at their house, should they indeed get there.
"I have found it hard not to cry at times," Mrs. Barlow said.
Actually, Thursday was the day things finally began to turn around at Heathrow, which was virtually shut down by five inches of snow that fell on Saturday and has struggled to catch up ever since. About 91 percent of the day's flights were on track to leave at some point, said a spokeswoman for BAA, which owns and operates the airport. As the afternoon wore on, though, many European flights were delayed and others canceled because of new outbreaks of bad weather in Ireland and on the Continent.
Those were not Heathrow's fault, the spokeswoman said. "There are issues in northern Europe that are complicating our efforts to allow everyone to continue their travel plans," she said.
These things are all relative. The airport was hardly its usual self on Thursday. Many stranded passengers had been sent to hotels, but others were still sleeping inside, some of them in BAA's own areas. "We've given over large parts of our offices to make the passengers more comfortable," the spokeswoman said.
Earlier in the week, some passengers slept in the tents put up outside the terminals. On Thursday, the tent areas looked less like campgrounds than refugee way stations, holding pens where blanket-swathed, baggage-burdened travelers clustered together, lured by the prospect of heat, chairs, free coffee and scraps of rumor leading to possible concrete information.
Other passengers had decided to brave the sharp cold outside and form a huge line in the car drop-off area, not realizing or not caring that nothing about being in the line could help them penetrate the building's perimeter.
"We're quite surprised that there's even a toilet, actually," said Alexander Mills, a 19-year-old student, who was sitting on his luggage in a tent and reading a novel called "How to Survive Christmas."
Just then an official in a yellow fluorescent jacket came in and declared: "Any passenger traveling on Flight 2473 to Munich, can you please make yourself known to the guys at the front."
Mr. Mills, who was not traveling to Munich, said that the problems at Heathrow were indicative of a general lack of competence in Britain during the latest cold snap.
"We've lasted two world wars, and we can't even deal with some snow," he said sadly, describing how the local government arrived to pour sand and salt on the icy roads near his house just as the ice was beginning to melt.
His friend Felix Schrell said that an inch of snow in his village in Essex on Saturday had led to a car accident that seriously injured a passenger. "An ambulance took the guy away, but it crashed on the way to hospital and killed him," he said.
"It was like 'Final Destination,' " Mr. Mills said, referring to a horror film.
Patricia Walker, 32, was also waiting to be allowed to try to check in to her flight, to Freetown, Sierra Leone. Though she had been waiting for four days, she said, at least she had been forced to spend the night on the sidewalk only once, on Sunday.
"They told me that since I hadn't checked in, I wasn't their responsibility," said Ms. Walker, who survived the bitter cold (the tents had not yet been erected) by unpacking her suitcase and cocooning herself in layers of clothing meant to be worn in balmy West Africa. "It was like a nightmare. People were crying -- children, pregnant women. Everyone was shouting, but they kept ignoring us."
Officials eventually allowed the camped-out passengers into a cafe on the outskirts of the terminal, near the check-in area. "They doubled the price of their sandwiches, to £8" -- more than $12 -- "and then they ran out of sandwiches," Ms. Walker said. The next morning, she went back home to south London, racked up a telephone bill of more than $160 waiting on hold for her airline's help line (passengers had to call a premium-rate number), and waited some more.
On Wednesday, she said, she received a text message summoning her on Thursday to the airport, where she had been since 6 a.m.
Weary and settled in one of the tents, Sayaka Carndorf, from Kent, said that she and her daughter had been assured Tuesday that their flight to Copenhagen was a go. So they took a taxi to the train station, took the train to London, took the subway to the express train to Heathrow and then waited for the flight, which was canceled two and a half hours later.
They returned home. On Wednesday, they were told that they had been put on a new flight on Thursday morning, and they made the trip to the airport all over again. "They told us to get here really early so that we could go to the counter and get a proper boarding pass," Ms. Carndorf said, "but they won't let us in."
As for Mr. Barlow, he said his experience at Heathrow had been far worse than his experience on the Brilliance of the Seas, which at one point listed at an 11-degree angle, shattering china and glass throughout the ship and slamming him, his wife, their possessions and a heavy table in a heap against their cabin door.
"At least that was quick," he said.