Blighty 2025 - Flying Home

Flight day dawned. All the bags had been repacked and reweighed, and all of them, thankfully, came in under the 23Kg limit. I eschewed breakfast on the grounds that I didn't need to spend another £20 on food when I'd done nothing but eat over the past month, and we moved seamlessly to getting the bags downstairs and loaded into the rental car again.

It's only a couple of minutes drive from the Hyatt Place to Terminal five, but I still manged to be in the wrong lane, and subsequently on the wrong road when trying to get back to the car hire drop off point. I managed to correct things without going too far out of our way, but still struggled with the complicated instructions on how to get to the drop-of point. Essentially it was a case of driving almost all the way around the T5 Sofitel Hotel before finding the entrance. They have a kind all 360 degree scanner you drive through when you leave, and again when you return. I guess it compares dents and scratches and the like without having someone come out and check. To the best of my knowledge, I hadn't added to the car's patina, so that was all good. Apart from dropping the key back in to the office, we didn't have to do anything other than unload the car - onto three trolleys - make our way back through the Sofitel and head into the departures hall of Terminal 5.

Dumping the bags was the first order of the day, so we did a self-service bag drop and boarding pass collection, which was all we needed to do having checked in online the night before. DW and I sat and relaxed before going through security, while Emma and Charlie went for a ride on the T5 Pod system for twenty minutes.

Going through security was relatively painless, for us at least. Emma had her bag opened and manually checked thanks to her carrying a big, resin, Lilliput Village church in her carry on baggage. Time had slipped away quickly, so we decided to head straight out to the gate, which was about as far away as you get from where we had arrived airside. You can walk it, and we have done that in the past, but this take we took the "transit", a little underground train that doesn't run often enough to make it a comfortable trip because it's always so crowded. Heathrow seems to specialize in not realising how many people move through their place; I remembered with horror the wholly inadequate lifts in Terminal 2, lifts that had no viable alternative, and were always bursting at the seams. The world's busiest airport really needs to do better, I think.

Our transport for the flight home waiting at the gate, and with the power of the Internet at hand, I interrogated it and found out that our aircraft was a 2025 Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It has come back to London from Barbados the previous day, and Toronto was its only flight this warm afternoon. How informative.

In our World Traveller Plus cabin, I was surprised to see the seat configuration was 2-3-2 and not 2-4-2 as it had been on the Airbus on the way over. Indeed, the seats were bigger, better padded and altogether an improvement over the outward leg. The Dreamliner also has fancy LED windows that lighten or darken at the push of button and, more pertinently for the crew, could be controlled as one from the flight deck, so no messing about with getting people to lift the window blinds for take off. 

We were sitting over the wing so were treated to a lot of wind and engine noise, and the sight of the Boeing's wing lifting and wobbling. It's a good job I understand the principals of flight or I might be a bit worried. The last time I flew on a 787, I remember it being quieter, but I'd trade the noise for the better seats any day. Flights are as flights are, pretty boring. The food was better this time, and I did enjoy a short while with Charlie on my lap watching Paw Patrol, which is so much better without the sound.

Then we were banking out over Lake Erie for a rare northward landing at Toronto Pearson Airport, getting a great view of the Islands and the CN Tower, which was all the better as it had been cloudy since we passed over Ireland. The airport wasn't much fun, though. Terminal 3 was packed, the customs kiosks were playing up and it took an age for two of our bags to show up in the arrivals hall, thanks to a technical fault in the conveyor system. The magic of Park and Ride was working well, though, as a Valet Parking bus was waiting at the curb, and as I'd already notified them through their phone app that we'd landed, the car was sat in the lot waiting for us. I do like Park and Fly, and it did take the edge off the fact that it had taken us two hours to clear the airport. 

Opening up the back of car to load our many bags, it was quite comforting to see that our Canadian (made in Ontario) Honda CRV had quite a bit more luggage space than our Skoda hire car, so the game of baggage Jenga wasn't quite so difficult. Mind you, two bags "self-unloaded" when we opened the tailgate at the On Route in Cambridge.

We arrived home tired, of course, and out of sorts given that it was 3am according to our body clocks. Still, we'd completed quite the epic journey. A month, give or take a day, and no major dramas (bar the Manchester accommodation), and we did most of the things we'd set out to do. Now, as we Brits are wont to say "we need a holiday to get over the holiday". Next week, people, next week.

Blighty 2025 - Homeward Bound Part One

Leaving a holiday rental is always traumatic. Tidying up, packing, and trying not to forget anything, and all before 10am. We had too many bags, and a couple of them were overweight, so packing and repacking was the order of the day, then doing a kind of puzzle, working out the best way to get the bags into the car while leaving room for passengers. Oh Lordy, holidays!

When I lived in the UK, I never liked driving along the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester. It's always been busy, and always seemed to carry a seriously high density of lorries. In the intervening years, things have not improved, and this despite the previous three lanes each way being expanded to four by utilising what had been the hard shoulder. Well, it used to be three lanes of slow moving traffic, now it's four lanes of slow moving traffic, giving life to the maxim that traffic will always expand to fill the existing road space.

This Wednesday morning was no exception to the way it had always been, wall to wall lorries and speeds well below the posted limit. Essentially, the road runs at capacity most of the time and any little glitch just causes chaos. This morning's little bit of fun was a lorry with a big static caravan on it's bed. The caravan was quite wide, so there was escort vehicle behind it, and in my innocence I imagined that because it was a wide load, it might well stay in the driving lane, that is the left lane, while it made progress. Not so this wagon. It picked up speed quite quickly, and started to pass people on the left, those people who were unwise enough not to drive faster than the lorry with the caravan. You might say that people should always drive in the left lane, and I would agree, but sometimes when you're passing people who are in the left lane, your lane slows, and then you have crazy lorry drivers whizzing up on your left with a wide load and getting perilously close to you. That was bad enough, but then the wide load driver decides the left lane's too slow, and one by one he moves out to the third from the left, and only stays there because he's not allowed in the right lane. So, he's doing sixty-five miles and hour, with a wide load, and squeezing faster vehicles as they try to go past him, legitimately, in the right lane. It only takes one driver doing sixty-six, or a nervous person in the right lane, to slow up that right lane and cause the brake lights to go for miles back, in a chain reaction. Meanwhile, our wide load lorry driver is still thrashing down the road, quite oblivious to the mayhem behind him. Because such bone-headed driving can only be done by a man.

Indeed, all the way to Birmingham, lorries occupied all three left-side lanes, this forcing anyone who needed to pass to the one passing lane remaining, on the right. I think there is a genuine case for lorries to be limited to the two left lanes only, but they don't always adhere to the rule saying they can't use the right lane, so I don't know how far that would get us.

It was a blessed relief, then, to pull onto the M6 Toll, and suddenly see the lorries, and a good deal of the other traffic, simply evaporate. To use that road is £10 well spent in my view.

Once through the construction work on the M42 to the east of Birmingham, and then on to the M40, it all became much more civilised. Sure it was busy, but I was able to drive in the left lane for some of the time, thanks to fewer lorries, which was quite the novelty.

As we approached London, the lady in the navigation system dutifully guided us down through Hayes, rather than directly to the airport, and our hotel for the night. I had it in my head that petrol was expensive around the airport, so set our destination to a Tesco filling station. As it happened, we stumbled upon a Sainsbury's first, so filled up there. I'm not sure how the rented car's fuel gauge worked because after I'd filled up the night before, it showed a range of exactly 500 miles. When I stopped to fill up again, some 200 miles later, it was showing a range of 475 miles. To add to the confusion, the car would only take £36 worth of petrol. A quick calculation made that around 75 miles to the Imperial gallon. While I'm happy to agree that 55-60 miles to the gallon was achievable, I think 75 miles to the gallon was quite the stretch. Anyway, it was still a good return, whatever the actual figure. We'd driven just short of 3,000 miles since picking the car up, and this was only the fourth time I'd put any fuel in. Now why can't North American cars be so economical?

The next stop was the Hyatt Place Hotel, just on Heathrow's northern perimeter. We had booked a couple of rooms for the night so that we could chill out and prepare for an early-ish flight out the following day. Maybe it was an abundance of caution, but we didn't want to be caught in dreadful traffic coming down from Manchester on the same day as we had to get a flight; my stress would have known no bounds. We also elected to keep the car for an extra day so that we could load all our stuff in it and drive it over to T5 rather than trying to get it all on a bus or in a taxi, and that's where the Hyatt Place came up trumps with its sexy underground car park. While the £17 overnight charge may seem steep, compared with some of the fees we'd paid over the past month, it wasn't bad at all.

The rooms in the hotel were small, but probably no smaller than in most London hotels. They were clean and well appointed, and both had a view over the airport and its northern runway, which was nice (although I think we'd paid a premium for an airport facing room). The scary thing was that the room was so well soundproofed, you could see the aircraft taking off 200 metres away, but couldn't hear them! I think the road noise outside also helped because later in the evening when the traffic had calmed down, you could just hear a low rumble as the jets took off. It was like someone had turned the sound off. Needless to say, I slept well.

Wednesday, tomorrow, was to be flying day - hold on to your hats!