Arrived New York

25/12/12
Started the day with ‘bubbles’ and present opening with Kerry. 

At the airport all formalities was very quick & easy and we were soon on the plane. Taking our seats one of the messages from the flight deck was “Thee American Government states that you are not to stand around in groups on this plane, especially around the toilet area.” Interesting! About to taxi out when the Captain states that because of storm activity in the area all the ground crew had to go into the airport buildings and we were staying where we were until they were given the all clear. We sat for over an hour, luckily we could watch movies. Finally we were off and taxied to the end of the runway when there was a strange sound and shuddering. The Captain comes on and says “You probably wondered what just happened. Well the runway is greasy and the nose wheel skidded. We now have to wait for an engineer to check it! Luckily all was well & we were finally on our way!.

Five movies, numerous tv programs and a couple of hours sleep later we arrived in Los Angeles to the American Christmas Day! We were now running very late & our 3 hour turn around was now down to about an hour. Our time was spent running through the airport, going through the formalities of right fingers, right thumb, left fingers,left thumb and eye photographs, checking your name, date of birth, where you were born, how long you were in USA, were you carrying alcohol or cigarettes - all very frustrating. Then we had to wait for our bags, collect them & run through the airport to the next point where our bags were hopefully loaded onto the New York flight. We then ran to the next terminal and got to the gate & walked onto the plane for New York.

Five hours later we touched down in New York. Amazingly the luggage arrived & it was into the yellow cab for the trip to the hotel. It was a rather ‘nippy’ 4C when we arrived. We went for a short walk & are now ready for a decent sleep.