Travel Day!

Well, our travel day has finally arrived. We got up around 9am.  Michael went over to Safeway to get some laundry detergent, batteries for the smoke alarm, a filter for the laundry machine—which Safeway didn’t have.  Well no matter—we had one last filter to put on the machine before we left.

There were lots of other last minute things to do to prepare the house—put the recycles out, and empty the trash in house or at least the third “last time”.  There are perhaps an endless number of things we could have done to prepare that I’m sure we could have filled almost any amount of time doing them.  Not just for the things we’d take with us, or choose to leave behind, but preparing the house and our lives in the US on hold while we are gone as well.

But thankfully there isn’t infinite time to prepare and before we knew it was 12 and Susan was at our place to provide us a ride to SFO for our flight.  First thing is first though, we had time for lunch at Max’s—the same Max’s we went to after our wedding.  We actually hadn’t been back since so this was a nice memory.  We had a nice lunch and good conversation.  We talked about “Fahrenheit 9/11” and Presidential trivia like Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd, then Secretary of War was present at Garfield’s assassination.  Susan and Michael enjoy Presidential trivia and often quiz each other on the Presidents.  (So far we can’t do better than remember about 32 of the 43 through—we’re working on it.

Susan dropped us at the airport and we were off! We had plenty of time which was a good thing because the check-in line was long.  Lucky for us they didn’t seem to check the weight on the bags.  It could be because the guy helping us just got new glasses and he had a hard enough time handling the tickets much less watching the scale. Not to worry, I glanced at the baggage tags and they were addressed correctly. Thankfully our bags made it to Glasgow without incident. That was good as I had brought a bunch of cables, my router, Vonage, some CDs, etc. so I would have been pretty upset if they didn’t make it!

After check in, we went through security. Other than a long line, no problems. We had about 30 minutes before boarding began so we grabbed some water for the flight. (Good advice from my Mother-in-Law about keeping hydrated on long flights!) The guy behind the counter was actually quite nice and told us that our trnasfer flight would be in Terminal 1 same as our SF-> London flight and that we would not go through customers in London. This was different than my recent experience in Amsterdam — but hey, what do I know? ;)

Our seats were good—we had no one behind us and Laurie appreciated being close to the bathroom. Every seatback has its own screen with the usual flight info (outside temperature, speed, estimated arrival time, etc.) Impressive that it was -76F during part of the flight over Greenland! Even though I don’t usually watch movies on planes, I watched Along Came Polly which was kind of cute.

I had also brought my iPAQ along loaded with 450 Mb or so of music which is nice. (It can make a cross-atlantic flight without charging the batteries.)