Saturday July 7th, US bound, Yay!!!

Saturday 7/7 US Airways Flight 773

I was very pleased to have woken with my alarm at 05.30, as I'm such a shit morning person. I made coffee while waiting for my daughter, Alex, to come and take us to Gatwick Airport. She was on good form and got us there in reasonable time. Alex drove off and we got a lift up to the departure level.. As soon as I got out of the lift, I realised I'd left my iphone behind. You can imagine how scathing the super-organised Kevin was! Until he went to let me use his phone to call Alex, and discovered he'd lprobably left it it in her car, hahahahaha! WTF? Ohhh, the stress!!!!

We checked our bags in and went off to try and get our phones brought to us, before we had to go through the security gate. I phoned home, Elaine phoned Alex, who was by then back in Brighton, and Alex got the phones to us OK. It's lucky my family have a good sense of humour. The plus side to the phone saga was that it made the time waiting at the airport go quite quickly, but now as I'm writing this over the middle of the Atlantic, heading 254 degrees at 550 miles an hour, I'm starting to wonder if maybe Kevin is a bit of a 'Jonah'? Anyway, here we are flying along at 36000 feet and 2000 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina.

It was raining a bit when we left Blighty, but our whole flight has, thus far, been in bright sunshine.

Oh, the joy of being one of the righteous!

The food on the plane was pretty good. They'd run out of BBQ chicken and sweet potatoes, so we had a nice veggy pasta dish. There was cherry toms and mozarella balls as a starter and a brownie for dessert. Later on we had a melted cheese panini type thing. The flight was eight hours, so got pretty boring towards the end, but it was very hot (100F+) when we got to Charlotte.

First smoke for 10 hours! We had a three hour stopover, at Charlotte, before the seventy five minute flight to Harrisburg, PA, where Customs/Border Agency messed with me for a bit. Richard was there when we were headed from the baggage area so we loaded up his little red 4X4 Suzuki and headed for Red Lion and his home.

En route to Red Lion, we hit the most horrendous storm. We'd seen lightning for some while but soon ran into horrible winds and rain. It was like a scene from a disaster movie, with treetops and cones flying across the road inches in front of the car and hitting it, too.. It was scary, really. However, we got to Richards', had a couple of beers, had a look at Rich's bikes and generally bullshitted for a while before Richard cooked a couple of brats for us. At 01.00, 25 hours after getting up, I turned in for the night.