Friday 9th May
As is always the case with flying to the US - especially the West Coast, it's a long old day.
Up at our usual 5am, we were all ready to leave by 7:15 for a leisurely drive over to Heathrow to get there by 9:00 for our car pickup. We should have had plenty of time.
All ready to be loaded!
The sat-nav suggested the best route through was straight through central London, so we headed off there. But slowly the ETA got later and later. We arrived at Heathrow at 9:35 in the end. Check-in and security were pretty quick and we headed over to the lounge.
Linda did a little trip off to Duty Free, but she was more restrained than normal! Meantime, I paid the congestion charge and phones 3 (my mobile supplier) and got roaming switched on for my phone. In theory, the 3 package I have gives me data in the US too - so hopefully there won't be a need to keep searching for WiFi whenever we want to search for anything... I'll keep my eye on the usage for a few days though - just in case!
Mustang Sally
We took off on Mustang Sally at 13:35 - it seemed like we had quite a wait after we'd pulled away from the gate. There were 334 people on board plus cabin crew - pretty full - especially as Virgin now sell through Delta too, there were quite a few Americans on board too.
The trip was scheduled for 11 hours, but we actually landed at 15:45 - so we'd caught up some time.
Immigration was quick but we waited ages for the cases. Fortunately they all arrived in one piece.
We have rented a car for the whole holiday (unlike in 2008 when we picked the car up on the last day in SF). So we hopped on the AirTrain to take us over to the rental facility. I'd managed to get my booking tagged with my Dollar Express number, so it was straight down to the garage to pick up our car - skipping the reasonable queue at the main desk! It's the same type of car as we had in Florida last year and I got on well with that.
The short drive from the airport to the hotel was pretty heavy traffic. No congestion charge here!
Traffic heading into downtown San Francisco
On arrival at the hotel we went straight down to the parking lot and unloaded the cases ourselves. It's very expensive to park in San Francisco. I saw public car parks 'offering' $5 per half hour(!) to park. I think we'll be paying something like $40 a night in the hotel - ouch.
By now, it was gone midnight, UK time, although the sun was shining here and it was pretty warm. That really screws your body clock. So we attempted to keep ourselves up as long as we could. We walked down to the local IHOP for a quick bite to eat. It was possibly the slowest service we'd ever had at that sort of place - and they got the order wrong AND screwed up the bill - Linda wasn't charged for her meal at all. So swings and roundabouts!
They were selling this gem though - I resisted!!
Eww.
Walking back to the hotel, we stopped off at a nearby Walgreens to pick up some milk for the coffee in the hotel room - we have a small fridge in the room too, so that's a bonus.
We finally crashed out at 21:30 Pacific Time - so we'd been up for 24.5 hours...sigh.