AFT goes ahead...

The alarm going off at 6am is always nice. It's even nicer when you've already been awake for the better part of an hour by the time it goes off. Somehow we were ready by the time the taxi arrived at 7. The Flightlink coach arrived pretty much on time, not that there was any rush. The most amazing thing about it was that I slept on it. I hardly ever sleep while travelling. A lot of this is to do with the fact that most of the time while travelling I'm actually driving, but this isn't always the case.

We got into Heathrow around half an hour early, giving us a wait of over five hours until we took off to look forward to. It didn't take long for us to make the most important discovery about Terminal 3. It had a Starbucks. It didn't take long for us to bagsy the comfy chairs, always nice when that happens. Something I noticed almost as soon as we were in the Terminal building was that my gaydar was picking up a lot of signals. Stupidly I made the mistake of mentioning this in a text message to my parents, resulting in them asking what gaydar was. That made for an interesting exchange of texts, not surprisingly.

We wandered up and down the departures corridor a few times to pass the time, which as it happened was passing more easily than we'd expected. I made the trek across to Terminal 2 to post an HBL Parcel(TM), and upon my return we decided to have a sit down in a place that some of you would probably find oddly familiar. Yes, we took up residence in Starbucks again. This time while we drank Alison read her Rough Guide and I re-read the chapter and a bit of Targeted that I'd written at the end of last year, in readiness for working on it at some later point.

By now it was finally time to check-in. We didn't have to queue for long, and then got to make the trip through security into the departure lounge. Inside we found somewhere to have lunch. Yes you've guessed it, Starbucks. Anyone surprised at this point really hasn't worked out the way things work around here.

So onto the flight. I was nervous. I don't fly that often and I'm always a little concerned about how well I'm going to cope with the experience. Once we were in the air though, there wasn't that much cause for nerves. It was a fairly smooth flight, and the presence of the pretty air hostesses is always nice :-) Today's stewardesses most likely to appear in one of Gareth's sordid femslash fantasies were Vicky and Marianne. Heh. Since we were flying on a Virgin plane, we got SNES video games built into our seats. On Andy's recommendation I gave most of my time to the game known as F-Zero, so called because it's supposed to go one better than F-1. Ha. Alison stuck to the Diamond Mine-esque Tetris Attacks.

Also during the flight I got to see my first ever episode of Coupling, with which I was quite impressed. I wrote of fair bit of Targeted, before once again needing to succumb to sleep. As we got towards the end of the flight (and were served a meal that included the delightfully out-of-bounds chocolate and banana muffin), Alison and I began bantering a lot, which is always good fun once we get into high-gear. The landing was a lot smoother than other ones I'd experienced recently, but as I worked out based on a certain amount of Physics and common sense, 747s aren't as likely to bounce all over the runway as they land on account of being one fuck of a lot heavier than short-haul jets.

I got held up in immigration. Not because of anything I did, just because the family in front of me in the queue hadn't filled their immigration cards out properly, and apparently weren't as polite as the immigration officer thought they should be. Also, as I went through customs I had to go and talk to Agriculture, so I could tell them I had some biscuits in my bag. All very nice and splendid.

We entered NYC by bus, and unfortunately crossed the East River into Manhattan by going under rather than over. I was quite looking forward to going across one of those fancy bridges so there was a little disappointment involved. Mostly though, by now Alison and I were fed up of travelling and just wanted to get to our hotel. The first bus dropped us off at Grand Central Station, and we had to wait for a second bus to take us to our hotel. I should point out that while we were waiting for this second bus it was fucking freezing.

When we finally got to our hotel we did little more than just drop our stuff off and then walk out to find some food. We were both more than a little bit dazed by this point, although the biting cold outside helped counteract this a little. On arrival at Times Square we decided that a T.G.I. Fridays would be adequate for our culinary needs. Our waiter this evening was Chris, a fact he saw need to point out every time he passed our table.

The walk back to the hotel held one or two surprises. The first was that we saw a couple of girls who were wandering around with midriff exposed. I really don't have a problem with exposed midriff, and given that showing midriff is quite fashionable at the moment it wouldn't normally be cause for note, but according to the reading on top of one of the buildings along Broadway it was -6 outside. That's a bit fucking cold for midriff, I'd say. Something else to note about that sort of cold is that with it you get steaming drains, and naturally that includes the sort of smells you expect from steam that comes out of a drain. Finally a saw I fat guy handing out leaflets and wearing an orange tabard that advertised "Topless Erotica". All seemed quite tasteful to me.

By the time we got to bed it was around 20 hours since we got up. Urgh.