Sunday 20th December 2009

[15:48 GMT]

Home once more!

We left Orlando last night at around 23:15 in the evening. The plan for the flight was to head out over the ocean, thus missing the snow storm that is currently hitting the Eastern Seaboard. The flight time was expected to be 7hours 22 minutes.

The flight itself was a bit bumpy, there were times that the seatbelt light was on constantly for long periods of time. However, despite this, we both managed to get some sleep - albeit intermittent. So by the time the place crawled over a frosty looking Cornwall, we were both feeling fairly refreshed.

Flying into Gatwick, we passed over a continuous path of snow covered fields. Even Gatwick itself had snow piled up around the outskirts of the runways. The airport has closed for a while overnight to give the engineers time to clear the snow. We landed safely, slightly ahead of time at 11:30am.

Any time we gained from being almost the first off the plane was immediately lost by the 90-odd minutes it took us to leave the airport. First we arrived at immigration behind a big queue from another earlier flight. Then we had to fight our way through lots of people trying to reclaim their baggage from two cancelled Easy-Jet flights. Finally, when we got the baggage carousel, our baggage seemed to come off at random intervals, almost like they were not stowed together.

Finally, out onto the snow countryside and a pretty quick drive back home. Best of all - the heating had restarted at home as planned :)