Compared to the nightmarish weather and travel dilemmas of the first leg, travelling exponentially further was somehow far less stressful.
I think that this was probably more down to the fact that there weren't extensive weather warnings for London across those few days, and our flight had been checked and checked again to make sure everything was still going ahead.
After another early start of 6:30am wakeup time, my parents very kindly gave us a lift to the airport, London Heathrow, and we were there around 8:20am, exactly 3 hours before our flight (cheesy photo taken and all!).
It wasn't a terrible experience, even if the initial check-in queue took just over an hour, we were through security in 15 minutes. This left just enough time to grab some tasty brekkie from Terminal 3 and head through our gate without fuss.
Lesson learned: let everyone else rush to the gate first.
Even better, the seat between ours on a row of three was left empty, meaning we had loads of space to ourselves. The baby in front of us was surprisingly well-behaved, the food was palatable, and neither of us suffered from plane-boredom (a well-known disease affecting those at high altitudes for long periods of time - can be fatal).
I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, crotcheted, and watched some films, while Matt watched some TV series, napped, and played some Pokemon: Blue. A little turbulence, but definitely not the worst I've experienced!
Better still, we expected a flight time of 11 hours, were told 10 hours at the start of the flight, and spent just over 9 hours in the air overall, making the journey even more manageable.
We had a slight panic that Matt's bag hadn't shown up (as we'd dropped it off as oversized baggage for being large hiking bags) but quickly received it. My face wash had leaked in mine, but if that's the worst thing we had to deal with all day, then I'd take that in a heartbeat over travelling by train in a national storm.
Matt's parents met us at Arrivals, and we were home to a very excited doggie (the dog of the week: Molly) before 4pm local time.
It's an 8-hour difference between the UK and San Francisco and I don't sleep well on planes, meaning that I'd been awake for over 23 hours, but we managed to stay awake until at least 8:30pm (I promise).
Overall, it was far less stressful than the previous "long leg" of our travels, and it made both of us feel a lot better about the next leg: Honolulu, then onto Auckland!
- Abi
Comments
Post a Comment