Desk to Departures

Had the fittest taxi driver I've seen in Warsaw in the whole 2.5ish years I've been here. That was a pleasant start to my long weekend! I don't classify my UK trips as holidays, but I'm always excited to be going. That excitement soon turned to frustration, as my carefully timed departure from work to tie in with a short wait before boarding was blown out of the water as I learned that the plane on which I'd be travelling on, hadn't even left London. And I'd travelled without an adaptor, which meant that my iPhone wasn't going to last the 2.75hr delay. So I now have yet another adaptor to add to my collection.

We made a bit of time up with a useful tail-wind and what a glorious sight, coming in over London at night - and out to the West. The skies were cloudless and I could make out exactly where I was. One of the better views of coming into land, for sure.

A delay in getting to a stand, a delay in getting off the plane - it was eventually a pier thing and not a bus - and a delay in Immigration. (As I write this, a month later, I know that I had nothing to complain about, what with the latest queueing horrors at Heathrow. Not that I would openly complain anyway - given that I work for the 'organisation'. (Organisation in the loosest sense of the word, at times) My friend - Dan was on night duty though, so I got to see him for all of 30 seconds, as he was mid-telephone conference with other management bods about the queues and lack of staff. It doesn't bode well for the Olympics...or the end of the Easter hols, when thousands and thousands of Brits return from the holibobs. And it doesn't fill me with excitement about returning to all of this in October/November time....

My late arrival into LHR tied in with my friend Jeni's arrival from her US trip, where she'd been stalking following Bruce Springsteen on his American tour, so I caught up with her in the baggage hall and then finally got a bus out to the car-hire place, where I stood in another queue for longer than I cared for. So I arrived in HW, about 2hrs after I saw it from a couple of thousand feet..... Fortunately, Stu and J had waited up! :-)