It Turned Out That We Had The Power All Along

My wife wanted to hit a seafood restaurant in terminal 5 of Heathrow airport on our way home from vacation recently that we’d previously visited. We hoped we could get there, given how segmented Heathrow is. However, we were coming into terminal 5, though flying out through terminal 3. That should work, right?

Well, coming into terminal 5 arrivals you can only go certain places. One of those places is not the departures area of terminal 5, where the restaurant was found. That’s because that area of terminal 5 can be exited to outside without passing through customs, and we had not passed through customs. They direct you a different way instead, either to customs or to your connecting flight. Ours was in terminal 3, as I mentioned before.

All right, we went through customs. That’s pretty simple for us, but they then wouldn’t let us enter terminal 5 to get to departures because our flight was out of a different terminal. Understandable, but annoying.

So we just went to terminal 3 like they wanted us to. As we were trying to figure out where to go else instead, we realized that they had expanded to seafood restaurant to have a location in terminal 3 as well.

As it turned out, we had the power to go to the seafood restaurant all along and all our other efforts were just folly.