Departure, Flight and First night. (Writing 27 Apr 04)

Departure, Flight and First night. (Writing 27 Apr 04)

 

I set myself a wake up for 3:30 am – 8:30 UK time - to help with the time change.  Mom was already up when I got downstairs.  I cooked us up some fried onions, kippers, and scrambled eggs to help convince us it was a reasonable time to be having breakfast.

 

Sara gave us a ride out to Dulles.  No traffic at 5:30 am.  I hope she didn’t have any trouble getting back into town after dropping us.  There were already an alarming number of people driving inbound.

 

There was only a short line at British Airways for check in.  This was the first time I tried the daylight flight to Europe.  It had benefits.  First, it wasn’t very popular, so we had plenty of room on the airplane.  We also got onto a fairly amenity laden plane.  Even in cattle class (World Traveler, as BA calls it) we had individual, tiny TVs on the seatbacks in front of us.  Mom and I both watched the movie Payback.  Ben Afleck plays a super gifted reverse engineer who has his memory medically erased after he finishes each job.  The story really zipped along but Ben never convinced me these things were actually happening to him. 

 

Much of the way it was very cloudy out, but it cleared out in patches just as we were flying over Ireland and we saw some bits of Wales.  As we descended to land at Heathrow, we finally got well below the cloud cover.  We flew over Windsor Castle at around 1,000 feet.  It looked exactly like a table top model of itself.

 

Immigration and customs went smoothly.  We met our driver who got us to the hotel.  After we checked in, we went back out for a little walk around Bayswater.  Had a pint at the Black Lion.  Took a more circuitous walk back to the hotel, just looking at buildings and in windows.  There’s one very striking building called Spire House quite nearby.  It’s a midsized, four storey apartment block that seems to have eaten the façade of an old church.  By the time we got back it was a little before 11 PM, and we were reasonably convinced the clocks were right.  I dragged myself through another chapter of Jane Eyre and fell off to sleep.

 

I’m ready to endorse the whole daylight flight.  I feel completely as though it is morning, in fact quite hungry for breakfast, and I didn’t have to sleep on a plane or drag myself through a zombie like day of enforced wakefulness.  I will continue to monitor.

 

Mom is just finishing up in the shower, so on to breakfast shortly.  The Ethernet jack in the room seems not to be working, so I’ll have to talk with somebody on staff to get this entry posted.  Clearly, if you’re reading this, I have.  (Actually, they never could get that to work.  I'm at a hotspot in London City airport uploading this.  Our flight to Manchester leaves in about 45 minutes.)