Wednesday 7th September 2011

[12:41 BST]

I'm sitting here in the No1 lounge in Heathrow's Terminal 3. The place hasn't been open for more than a few weeks.

It's not too busy in here and has plenty of seating and free stuff.

Linda is off having a look around the duty free whilst I'm having a mess around with the laptop (free wifi!).

We managed to make the trip over to Heathrow without hitting any rain, but it's still dark and gloomy outside so there's a good chance we will see rain soon.

[13:49]

We've had a couple of showers, but nothing terrible. There might be some strong winds about at the moment though, as the Virgin web site shows our expected arrival time as 18:18 US time, but the normal time should be 17:35. Must be a strong headwind today :(

Our gate's on the board at last - Gate 13! Dum dum dahh!!

[19:24]

231 passengers on this flight. Initially the captain said we were going to fly into some strong headwinds - hence the 7.5 hour flight time. However, we're about half way through the flight at the moment and we are taking a much more southerly route, trying to avoid the headwinds. Surprisingly, despite the headwinds, we actually had a very smooth flight - no 'seatbelts on' signs at all.

So far I've only watched one film, Rango. I was about to start another when I realised that my seat has a power sockets in it. This means that for the first time ever on a flight, I've been able to use my power converter box that I bought especially for use on planes. Normally, on Florida flights, the planes are too old for sockets.

Thus is means that I can boot up the laptop and do a bit of gaming for a couple of hours. Kung Fu Panda 2 will have to wait until another day.

[05:51 EDT+1]

This is being written 'tomorrow'.

Our flight actually made good time - however, once above Boston we circled for almost 30 minutes, waiting for a landing slot I guess. It's not that we could see much outside as we were flying in a real pea soup - the cloud level was very low outside.

We finally were on the ground about 18:20 (US time). Through customs and baggage pretty quickly.

Outside of the terminal, we just missed out bus to the car rental. After 10 minutes another appeared - it was easily the smallest bus on the road! And already had people in it. Happily, the driver managed to squeeze all our cases on (just) but I had to stand the route as there were no spare seats. :(

We collected our car (which oddly included a sat nav even though I was sure I'd not ordered one) and set off for the hotel - by now it was 8:30pm.

Our route took us away from our direction initially as we had driven out into a major road, no left turn! Things were made worse by part of our route being jammed up by a long line of police cars investigating something or other.

There was no other way to describe the drive to the hotel other than crappy. It was dark, raining or misty all the way to there. We were in a new car and in an area unknown to either of us. It was gone 10pm when we arrived at the hotel.

After check-in there was only time to grab some night clothes and jump straight into bed as by now it was nearly 4am UK time - we were knackered!

Still, outside looked nice once in the mist from the balcony.