Tag: holidays

Coming to America

We’ve got a pretty good routine working for flying to America.

It starts with driving down to Heathrow the night before the flight and staying in a hotel close to the airport – usually the Park Inn as it does park and fly deals where you can get a room and 15 days of parking for under £120. Doing this has several advantages:

  • Doing it by coach on Saturday morning would mean leaving Cheltenham at some very silly time in the early morning.
  • If there are travel delays you are pretty much screwed
  • An early morning start doesn’t fit well with a day that involves landing in Maine at 5pm EST (so 10pm UK time).

So instead we leave town after an evening meal, and after the commuter rush has cleared, and if there are delays on route it doesn’t really matter. We still have to get up early but 5am is a lot less ridiculous than 2 or 3am. We then hop on the Hotel Hoppa and it’s 10 minutes to the terminal with no major dragging of luggage down miles of corridors.

The only real gamble is the airlines… usually they’re pretty good but this time United Airlines let us down a little – UA 922 on Saturday was a tired plane, and apart from the wifi streamed movies via their app or browser it was like flying in 2001… a fixed set of movies running on a fixed cycle on a tiny seat back display and pretty uninspiring food (chicken curry or a pasta dish) and they’d managed to heat the butter up so you got a pot of melted butter rather and a portion of butter … However the cabin crew were friendly and were very pro-active in providing soft drinks throughout the flight and the legroom wasn’t bad for economy class.

New Yotk Liberty has a slightly odd layout – you arrive at the International Terminal (B) and go through immigration and customs.. then you drop off your luggage before getting on the Sky Train and going to another terminal (A) where you go back through security to get to the departure gates. But when you fly the other way you get a shuttle from A to B and don’t have to go through security again… seems very odd but that’s how it is.

The 50 seater plane to Portland Maine was basic as you’d expect and the turbulence that had wobbled the Boeing on the way down through Maine shook the smaller craft round quite a lot and the final approach into Portland was a bit of a roller-coaster ride.

But now I’m here for the next couple of weeks:

IMG_0457

The Rain in Maine…

…was mainly on the Interstate.

The weather was pretty lousy when we drove down to Heathrow on Friday night and we took it steady on the M4 but several lunatics in BMW’s steamed past us at speeds that must have been in excess of 90 mph. We stopped at Reading services for a coffee and loo break before heading back out and getting to the hotel at a not unreasonable hour.

Saturday morning the weather wasn’t much better and the hotel hoppa took us to Terminal 5 through some pretty lousy weather and flooded roads. The bus drive nearly drove into the back of a broken down car, and I think he was the only person who hadn’t seen it.

We left Heathrow about 30 minutes late in very heavy wind and rain and the take-off was pretty shaky and the pilot didn’t waste any time in getting above the storm and most of the flight was quite smooth, apart from the annoying kid in the seat behind me who kept kicking and hitting the seat and whose parents didn’t seem to give a toss. I’d like it if when you book airline seats and they ask if you have special dietary requirements if you could also specify that you don’t want to sit next to, directly in front of, or behind, snotty little brats.

The captain told us that the weather in Boston was pretty much the same as in London and he was right, it was muggy and raining and despite us leaving Heathrow late we actually landed a little early. As we were walking away from the plane I noticed that a lot of the stands were empty and that there hardly seemed to be any planes around. The immigration hall was pretty much deserted and we were only standing in line for a couple of minutes. The immigration officer told us that it was “just a lull” but when we got down into baggage claim the place was pretty much deserted with no other carousels running and our luggage came out pretty quickly.

Then the fun began. We’d brought two bottles of alcohol into the country and the immigration officer asked us if we’d got foodstuffs etc. We said no and he scribbled things on our customs form. After we’d collected our luggage and we headed towards custom we were intercepted and the form looked at and the same questions asked and our form marked again. We were told to go over to one side where they asked us the same questions about foodstuffs etc. and then we had to put all our bags through a scanner.

But even with that we were still outside in a record time. It felt odd to be in Boston in daylight as we usually seem to arrive there late in the afternoon. The bus turned up and we got on and soon we were heading North.

The rain, which had been consistent but light turned heavier and heavier and it wasn’t long before the bus was the fastest thing on the road. I’m not sure how the driver could see where we were going but we got to the bus station in Portland about 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Our cases were dragged off the bus and one of them was a little damp, which given the weather was hardly surprising.

The rain backed off a little bit but then came on a lot harder just in time for Rick and Jill to turn up to collect us.

The rain got heavier and heavier and the drive north wasn’t much fun and there was a lot of standing water on the road. We’d got wet getting the suitcases into the back of the truck and we’d not actually dried out much by the time we had to get out and unload the cases again. They said that it did just over 2.5 inches of rain but I guess we must have been travelling with the heaviest part of the storm because it felt like a lot more.

Everything was a little wet when we unpacked it but we soon got everything dried off and the weather has been pretty good since then.