We set off for London Heath Row on Tuesday the 5th because we had booked a room at the Park Inn, for an overnight stay, on the edge of the airport for almost the same price as basic offsite parking for two weeks and there was 15 days parking thrown in for free. So it felt a quite leisurely preparation for the first journey of the holiday proper. Since the flight was reasonably early, 8.30am, we caught the airport shuttle bus at about 5.45 and were quickly in the American Airlines check in system, using the word system very loosely. Their method is that everybody queues in the same set of bullpens and the first people to the desks check in for their flights regardless of which flights are imminent. As soon as it gets tight for time for any particular flight, the people needing that flight are escorted out of the queue, past the other passengers, and on to the desks. Thus at about 7.00 we were checked in as a pair but with non-adjoining seats, a recurring theme of the whole holiday. Security remains tight and the process of going air-side consumed most of the period we had penciled in for breakfast and we only managed a final cup of English tea before being embarked on our flight. The lady placed between us by the American Airlines lottery cheerfully swapped places to reunite us and we were soon eating breakfast. We enjoyed the in-flight entertainment, we both, at different times, watched Margaret Thatcher’s early years as a prospective candidate for the Tory party, if the film is to be believed it explains some of her vindictive nature when she finally achieved real power, there were also some nice lighter moments when her son, Mark, managed to get lost as a child, and Carol was cooking with the aid of the nanny.
Arrival in New York was painless, some people had more trouble than us getting past immigration but it seemed they had missed the 37 time we were told that we had to fill in an immigration form and they polled up to the desks professing no knowledge of the system. Our particular official, a huge older black man, had already had one sortie into the assembled hoard waiting to be admitted to the US of A, when he detected the use of a camera, one of the offences we had been warned about by the million signs which welcomed us, he settled for the deletion of the picture taken when we were betting on summary execution. Julia met him first and he was, of course, cheerful and welcoming to us, she has the gift of getting the best out of people.
We had lugged our baggage through customs but shortly after that we were relieved of it, so casually that we scarcely expected to see it again, but it turned up correctly in LA. With a three hour connection time we had time for a beer in the airport sports bar where we discovered that my phone would, despite having £30 credit on it, be purely ornamental for the duration, it’s too basic to seek out foreign networks. Julia’s phone, a much higher tech device being one of Sarah’s cast-offs, fared no better in New York so we couldn’t let anyone know of our progress.
