Saturday October 6th
[20:31 EDT]
Once again, we left home to travel to the airport in the dark and rain. In fact it wasn't a very nice drive to at all what with the spray and drizzle/rain for most of the journey. Still, we arrived in good time and the meet and greet car man was a big help, assisting with the bags (all four!!) and generally putting us in a better mood that the morning drive had left us.
We stopped off in the Servis Air Lounge for a couple of hours, but it was much too busy in there. Certainly the busiest I've ever seen the lounge. Flight left the gate on time, but was about 10 minutes behind schedule by the time we actually left the ground. 454 people on board.
We were on Hot Lips again. But this time, she's been completely refitted. The seats in E and PE (and I assume UC) are all new, together with the new in-flight entertainment console.
In PE this included a removable touch remote plus a much bigger screen than the old one (1 guess about 8 inches across).
It also includes two USB ports (one in E) on the chair back.
the other ports at the bottom apparently allow playback of video devices such as ipods and usk keys too. Main screen was also a touch screen.
In the end I watched Prometheus, Pirates (with Scientists) and 3/4 of the last Sherlock Holmes film.
Hot Lips was also sporting the new GW1 seat layout which has 36 economy seats upstairs in the 747 where 24 PE seats has used to be. The upstairs was separated by a curtain.
Early on in the flight - somewhere near Iceland I guess, we hit some turbulence that was quite severe - so much so that the poor stewardesses that had just started serving dinner, had to return their trolleys to the back as the side shears were forcing them to hang onto the trolleys to stop them toppling over. In the end they had to go back to their seats for a while. Eventually the captain took the plane lower by 2000 feet to find calmer air. The rest of the trip was uneventful.
We got into immigration right behind the VS075 flight from Manchester, so that meant we were about 30 minutes queuing behind 400 northerners! Straight after us, VS071 arrived from Glasgow so the room was filled with 1000+ Brits, all trying to get through 10-or-so immigration desks. :(
Needless to say, the cases were already on the carousel by the time we got through.
Off to get the car, I'd signed up for Dollar Express a while back, but wasn't sure where to go to get seen. It turns out all we needed to do is cross straight over to the car park and collect the car from the kiosk there. No need to queue at the main desk. Pick picked a nice looking white Ford Escape. Packed everything into it and only then did we discover that there were no keys in the car! So in the end we unloaded and moved to the next car along in the bay. On leaving the airport, I was about to pull onto the 417 (it's equivalent of a big A road in the UK) when I noticed the bonnet suddenly bobbed up a little. I looked, thinking I'd imagined it, and it did it again! I pulled over on the entry slip way to discover that the bonnet was just sitting on the engine and I could open it without needing to do anything - just lift it up! Luckily, it locked properly when I slammed it down.
That's now three things we need to do when getting a hire car - check for a spare type, find the key before we load up and check the bonnet is secure!
We had bid on Priceline for a cheap deal on a hotel for our first night and had got the Onmi Championsgate Resort which is a golf hotel, surrounded by a course or maybe two, I'm not 100% sure. Not a bad place for £59! Quick bite to eat this evening before it was time for bed - it's now 2am in the morning according to the laptop clock. :|