Coming to America: MrPicky and Pickychick fly Virgin –and pop their flight transfer cherries

Ok, this is over a week old by now, but dial-up internet is indeed the devil. My apologies for the delay.

So the plan was to go down to London on Monday, take the train to Gatwick, spend the night at a hotel near the airport, and then fly to Vegas Tuesday morning, with a nice nifty direct flight. Sounds simple, right? It does, doesn’t it, but the reality turned out quite differently.

We did indeed spend the night at a hotel near Gatwick, a nice small homely affair, with very good Indian food to our utmost delight, as the March weather had taken a turn for the worse, and the “leisurely stroll” to the nearest town did not seem very appealing in a horizontal sleet storm.

The next morning we got to the airport, checked in, and eventually got to our gate. May I take this opportunity to mention I really don’t like Gatwick? It is one of the most chaotic and maze-like airports I’ve ever been to, and getting to one’s gate is always a drawn-out process. Anyhoo, our flight was already boarding, when they put a stop to it. After an hour of sitting at the gate we were informed that there was a technical problem with the plane, another plane would be flown in from Heathrow and it would depart three hours past our original time, but the catch was that it was sixty seats smaller than our scheduled plane.

They then asked for sixty volunteers to stay behind, and fly the next day from Heathrow to either L.A. or San Francisco and then from there to Vegas. When they announced the “attractive package” they’d be offering would include meals, hotel room and transportation to Heathrow as well as 410 pounds per person, we decided to go for it. We figured it would be worth it for a 24-hr delay.

After spending the next five hours at the airport, getting our luggage back and sorting out the tickets and whatnots, we were on our way to the Ibis hotel at Heathrow. I must say that if we’d paid for it, I would’ve probably considered asking for our money back, and the hotel we stayed at near Gatwick definitely beat this one by about 100 to 1. Yes, the first one was somewhat worn out, but it most certainly had character which the airport hotel lacked. Not to mention the fact that the White House Hotel (which is what the Gatwick hotel was called) served the best Indian food south of Warwick, whereas the food at Ibis was suspiciously unidentifiable at worst and edible at best.

The next morning we were bused to Heathrow, and awaited our flight by gorging on a huge breakfast, trying to spend the 20 pounds per person that Virgin gave us (and failed miserably I might add, even at airport prices we ended up barely spending half), and by the time our flight was supposed to start boarding, began to glance anxiously at the departure gates board, where our flight was classified as “please wait”. Now, normally this would’ve hardly seemed out of the ordinary, but due to the previous day we felt slightly uneasy. As flights scheduled for takeoff fifteen minutes after ours began boarding, we made our way to the ticket desk, fearing the worst. The delay turned out to be one hour, which under the circumstances was definitely good news for us.

The flight itself went smoothly, we’d booked exit row seats (which by the way Virgin charges 75 quid for—the window seat was ‘free’ due to slightly less space), and definitely appreciated the extra legroom when we found out just how cramped the seats are. A word of warning: if you find seats on other trans-Atlantic flights narrow, do not consider flying economy with Virgin, because they are definitely a good 15 cm narrower than those on, for instance, Delta, SAS, Air France and BA (and a hell of a lot narrower than those on the cheapo airlines in Europe such as Ryanair and bmibaby, but that’s another story entirely). The in-flight entertainment was a pleasant surprise as they have video-on-demand (something I’ve waited for with other airlines for years now), and you can actually choose when you want to watch something. Comes in quite handy.
The food was surprisingly good, and there was plenty of it. This is the first time we’ve flown across the pond so well-fed.

We landed in San Francisco, cleared immigration in record timing, and made our way to the United Airlines desk. This ended up turning into quite the chaos for the 60 of us, as we’d been split between two different flights, and there were two different terminals to choose on. Fortunately we picked the right one, but a good ten people waited for a half-hour in line before realizing they were in the wrong terminal. Oopsie.

At this point it didn’t come as a surprise that our 6:30pm flight had been delayed by two hours. As much as I like the San Francisco airport, we didn’t quite appreciate our five-hour wait. After a pleasantly short flight, we finally landed in Vegas at 10pm, 46 hours after we began what was supposed to be a pleasant 12-hour flight. But to look on the bright side, we somehow managed to skip jetlag entirely. Bring on the sunshine and warmth.

Oops, My Bad

It's been brought to my attention that it's been almost three months since my last post. Oopsie. I do have an impressive selection of excuses, but maybe I'll save those for a rainy day.

A quick update:

1. I got me a jobby job. Will start sometime in late April, after we come back from our travels (see #2 & #3). Still waiting for the official offer letter with the start dates, but that should get here this week. It better.
2. We're going to Vegas in a week's time. Almost three weeks of sunshine and warmth. I can hardly wait.
3. A whopping 4 days after our return, we will fly to Belfast in the throes of jetlag. From Belfast we'll drive down to Cork, then back up to Belfast and fly home. Just in time to recouperate for 6 days before...
4. Flying to Amsterdam for the WT pissup. I feel so spoiled, all these great trips coming up.
5. I can feel spring coming. Days are getting longer, and the air feels different. Winter is finally over, and I can come out of hibernation.

So there. The past three months can be nicely condensed into five points. Well, almost at least. I've also been working out diligently (5 days a week most weeks) and am actually saddened by the inevitable one month break (I keep telling myself I'll do some basic exercising while we're away but who am I kidding), we've watched Battlestar Galactica from start to present in a matter of weeks (accomplishment of sorts I'm sure), I've learned a foolproof muffin recipe which we're exploiting at alarming pace, and I now have three friends left who aren't in various stages of procreating.

Not much going on, and certainly very little of interest, I'm afraid. But I'm sure once we get back home and I start working that'll change.

Back to your regular programming.