Coming in to land

Welcome, avian reader, as I take you on a journey of almost 24 hours, because that's genuinely how long it took us to get from the UK back home to Palo Alto.

The pandemic has obviously restricted our ability to travel on a whim. Now, if I've learnt one thing over the holidays, it's that I really don't miss getting on planes. Airports are of course one of my favourite places on Earth, and the experience of being shut in a metal tube for 11 hours with 300 of your fellow humans is one that I'd rather not repeat that often.

We started our trip home from our hotel in Ascot. We drove our hire car back to Heathrow, and soon we were enjoying the pleasures of Heathrow terminal 5, the least worst of all the terminals. I get the feeling that the guy at security had never seen a crochet hook before; well now he has, because my wife thinks that's an appropriate item to take in hand luggage. I guess not too many terrorists are also knitters.

We got to see a lot more of terminal 5 than we might have liked, because as it happened the flight was three hours late. The folks at the gate kept saying scary things like, "We're just going to do an engine test run", because of course, testing a jet engine for five minutes on the ground is a perfect analog for spending 11 hours at high altitude and cruising speed. Once we got on the plane it turned out that the part of the engine which de-ices the wings had not been working. This is not scary at all.

Anyway, the engine did its thing and we arrived safely in San Francisco, where the American authorities were generous enough to let us back into the country! Overall the trip had involved two flights and 16 Covid tests, and had turned into a bit of a project, but it was very much worth it. We even won at Baggage Bingo!