In America, Flights Were Pretty Good

So I’m here in Los Angeles now, after a pretty good set of flights from Edinburgh to the West Coast of america. Now they weren’t perfect, but on the fare that I pay, that’snever going to be possible. What I will say is that I had my head screwed on, and mentally they were pretty easy.

I’m spending today, as always on trips, as the a day of nothing. Hanging out with Lance Anderson, grabbing a Denny’s breakfast, and generally gettign things in order to start doing all the podcasting and Razzie reporting tomorrow.

The Edinburgh to Heathrow leg was pretty uneventful, although we had to sit at the tarmac at Edinburgh for 40 minutes, we managed to get into Heathrow only five minutes behind schedule. So I’m guessing BA has a lot of slack in the timetable for stooging around London, which we didn’t do, it was a straight in approach.

While not a mad dash across Heathrow, it was certainly brisk, but made the American Airlines departure lounge for the 777 to Chicago with time to spare. The lounge look strangely empty of passengers, and once the first and business class passengers had been called, there were very few people left waiting. So the rear cabin (where I was sitting) of 130 seats had a total of 22 passengers and 4 stewards to help us. If only every flight could be as spacious as that one, with the stewards able to spend time with you and offer an almost in seat, on-demand snacks and drinks service for the flight. Must have been an easy flight for them as well!

Chicago saw what look to be a panic with a 15 row deep customs queue, but just as I walked up, the second “hall” opened with a new, empty, queue so I went for that, was through in five minutes, had grabbed the luggage and on o get the connection to LA. TSA security, well there’s two entrys at the Internal Terminal at O’Hare. The first is always a massive scrum as it is next to the tram exit, but a few minutes walk takes you to the second entrance that very rarely has a queue. So straight through that as well with no queing either. Plenty time to sit down, have a burger, and stroll up to the departure gate to see a one houre delay on the flight to LA.

No problem at all, there’s a free power point, let’s pop the PSP on charge and watch some of the older IT Crowd episodes. Finally boarded a packed out MD-80 and ended up sitting next to a dead-heading Fed Ex pilot returning to LA – his Mac Powerbook was showing Wallace and Gromit, and freakily, so was my PSP!

Arrived in LA only an hour late, at 0030 local time. Total time from leaving the hosue in Edinburgh to reaching Lance’s spare bedroom was 22 hours, with an in-the-air time of 14 hours. At the moemnt I’m tired physically, but mentally pretty on the ball, and nto feeling that bad from the day of travel. Going back will be harder!