48 Hour Delay

Last Friday, I left for a three day Birmingham; I was due to return Sunday at noon. I had a great crew, a great layover in this cozy little English town upon Avon, awesome dinner at an Indian restaurant complete with a Leffe. Get to the airport Sunday morning where we were greeted with "good morning, you're delayed and its not looking good." The ground staff got us rooms at the airport hotel straight away and we were released from duty until 7 pm. They bused our passengers to Heathrow, and had parts brought in from both Heathrow and Newark. When we got our update at 7 pm of day three, they had fixed what they thought to be the problem but there was still a leak and it had to be corrected by 11 in order to run the engine tests due to the noise curfew. Operations had no idea that there even was a noise curfew at this airport. We had dinner at the airport as a crew which was lovely. (Ricky! Oh that's lovely!). It had been decided by the powers that be that we should be ready to report for duty at 7:30ish the morning of day 4. Word came that they had fixed the initial issues in the engine; however, when they were taking the plane out to run the engine tests, air traffic control told them to turn around and when they did, exceeded the range of the plane, and therefore broke the nose gear. Our rooms were held for the rest of the day, we had breakfast in the terminal, lunch in the bar, and dinner at the buffet and went no where. Finally, on day five at 5:40 in the morning we met downstairs in the lobby, went back to the terminal, and were driven across the taxi ways to our aircraft which we boarded at 6:30, sans passengers! Though it totally sucked to be stuck at the airport hotel in Birmingham for 48 hours, it was so amazing to ferry the plane across the Atlantic. We finally landed back in Newark at 10:15 or so, and I made it just in time to go to my German class at 1:20 in South Jersey. Surprisingly enough, last night was the first night I slept all the way through and I don't want to go to work for the rest of the month!