THURSDAY , 26 OCTOBER 2023

(Manchester, UK – Atlanta, GA)

I slept so well that I was very surprised when my phone alarm went off at 0805. I was surprised for two reasons. Firstly, it woke me up, and I’m usually awake by that time. Secondly, the main alarm clock should have gone off at 0800. It transpired we had set that one for 8pm, and given we were sound asleep, it’s just as well that we set the back up on my phone. The black out blinds were clearly effective, and the room so well sound proofed that we hadn’t heard any planes or other noise all night.

Readers of previous blogs will know, however, that my true test of a room is the quality of the shower and I had high hopes from just looking at it. It was indeed a shower to create shower envy. It was spacious, powerful and I wanted to take it with me… I was suitably enjoying shampooing my hair with vigour, when I remembered the one thing that was in the suitcase and not in my hand luggage. My hairbrush. I’m not quite sure what it says about my regular hair ‘style’, but Andrew confirmed that he couldn’t tell the difference between the resulting hairstyle without a brush and my usual look.

We left the hotel at 0912, proceeded straight to security where there was minimal queue, and were seated in the San Carlo restaurant, ready for breakfast by 0942, so all in all, a very relaxed start to the day. The restaurant was quiet, and the server was in no rush to move us along, informing us there wasn’t much seating at the gate anyway, so we took our time, leaving only to get to the gate on time. This worked so well that, just as we were getting to the gate they announced they were boarding our group of seats, and we walked straight up to the gate and boarded.

We settled in with the usual pre flight drink, the flight pushed back right on time, and after a short taxi it departed without any queue for the runway. One minute into the flight we got to cloud level (1100 feet), and after that we didn’t see much for the whole flight. It turned out that it wasn’t just Manchester that was cloudy. Brief sightings of land were had near southern Canada and over the Georgia mountains.

Window gazing mostly revealed a lot of other transatlantic flights.

Aside from reading books and watching two movies, we also fitted in a lot of eating or drinking:

Pre departure drinks

Pre dinner drinks and a snack

Dinner

Tea / Coffee

Juice

Ice lolly

Crackers saved from dinner

More soft drinks

Snack attack from the wander wall

Mile High Tea

The flight was 8.5 hours long, so perhaps it’s not too bad…

We landed at 3.30, were off the plane by 3.45, and had cleared immigration, picked up the cases and arrived outside to board a shuttle bus to the domestic terminal all within half an hour.

After a slightly crazy, but certainly speedy, shuttle ride we disembarked and waited for the free shuttle bus to the hotel. It allegedly runs every half hour. After more than half an hour, and having seen a lot of shuttles to just about every other hotel, we gave up, counted our cash left over from previous trips, and decided to get a taxi. It was exorbitant for a 5 minute ride, but worth it to get the last bit of travelling completed. It was the only bit that hadn’t gone extremely smoothly, so not too bad over all.

We checked in and were soon in our very spacious room. Andrew declared the shower to be not as good as this morning, but still good. After freshening up we went down to the hotel restaurant, a casual affair in the foyer, for dinner. Food was good and the server was great. Now back in the room to unwind and sleep. Early start tomorrow.

Air miles: 4085

Taxi: 2