Wednesday 9th December 2009

No Change There Then

[09:19] I'm sitting in the Servisair Lounge at the moment. Linda is nowhere to be seen. No prizes for guessing where she is at the moment... Indeed, she's off ransacking the duty free! No, I said no prizes, that was too easy!

Weather outside looks murky, it was drizzle earlier on as we drove into Gatwick, but it appears to be clearing up now. Flight is on time at the moment too, so things could be a lot worse. The drive into Gatwick was a bit of a chore. What should have taken a hour according to TomTom ended up taking 90 minutes to do - just heavy traffic it seems.

Car was picked up without a hitch at departures and check-in wasn't too stressful. Indeed, we were both through security without a beep - which was fortunate as security did seem very enthusiastic with the body searches this time through. I shuddered as I noticed a box of latex gloves on the side of the scanner machine...

[09:31] Another aircraft pulls away down the runway and into the ever clearing sky. Is that a peep of sunlight there??? It's an omen I say, sunshine for the next week and a half wherever we go I tell you!! Nothing can be worse than last time, can it?

[20:48 EST]

The Virgin 747-400 Pretty Woman left the runway at 11:25am which is almost on time! There were 444 of us on board, apparently, together with 15 crew. I had a look at the film list and there were a few films I'd not seen yet. So I busied myself with Public Enemies (7.5/10), Transformers 2 (4/10) and The Hurt Locker (7/10). This meant that by the time I'd gone through these three, we were well down the US Eastern Seaboard and fast approaching Florida.

Touchdown was at 15:30 US time - almost predicted to the minute. As we were upstairs, we were one of the first through to immigration. Despite there being a couple of missing parts on our green immigration form, our luck was in as the guy let us complete the form whilst he did my fingerprints. When we did that in Las Vegas, we got sent to the back of the queue!!!

Our luggage was one of the first out and even picking up the car was pretty painless. This meant we were in the villa by 17:30 - a feat unsurpassed in our history!

We didn't hang around too long indoors though - a quick bite to eat and a visit to the Publix to stock up on supplies for the week meant we were not back to the villa until after eight.

Linda has just finished unpacking the clothes. I think it's time to test out the pool.

We've not heard anything from the balloon people, so it looks like out balloon ride won't be cancelled due to bad weather. Either that or they've lost our number!