My holiday diary: Arrivals (Day 1)

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Originally uploaded by ambroseneville.

For the next week or so, I'll be writing my holiday diary here.

The first day of my holiday to Florida, with my mate Jack, was marked by the usual things like needing to get up early, catching the tube then the train, then arriving at Gatwick Airport. Once at Gatwick, I opted for a full English breakfast, and then realised that I had to send off some cash to an ebay seller in Germany before I left, which involved a little trip to the bureau de change. Just after we'd been there and found a post box, Jack and I were walking towards the terminals at a leisurely pace, when we suddenly noticed that the overhead monitors showed that they were closing our terminal, the display flashing this information out in bright red. We sprinted like crazy for the next 4 or 5 minutes, and managed to get there okay. Needless to say, the plane didn't depart for about another 40 minutes.

The flight itself was quite uneventful. Since the only TV screens were a fair way away (which I thought unusual for a 9.5 hr flight) I decided to read my book on the birth of punk, which kept me occupied for most of the journey, apart from when I would look over and burst into laughter at how much a nearby old American lady looked like Stephen Hawking. On a couple of occasions I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but it wasn't going to be easy with the noises of kids behind us to the left. As luck would have it, they couldn't provide change for my banknote, so I got a beer for free. Also, the prepacked meals on the flight weren't completely awful, which was good.

Our connecting flight was to fly from Cincinnati. As we got off the plane, we had to giver Thurston a call to find out what his address was, or immigration officials would have big problems with us, and I'd also dropped my phone on the plane, but it was kindly retrieved by one of the staff. I went for the routine immigration interrogation and was greeted by a man who said "where you goin' today, dawg?". I still held back from making any jokes about carrying explosives with me, however.

Outside the airport there was thick snow, punctuated by the runways scoring their way across the fields. To me, it was a bit reminiscent of the airport that the mother is trying to get back from in Home Alone, particularly since they had Christmas decorations up all over the place. While we waited at Cincinnati, I grabbed a coffee and bought some headphones with a retractable cord.

Our next flight was only 2hrs or so long, and then we arrived at Orlando airport. We saw Andrew very soon after getting out of immigration, then Thurston seconds later. It was a huge relief to have arrived, and I was looking forward to the holiday enormously.