Over the arctic

An incredible day that went as smoothly as it could possibly have done. No hold up at the airport, quickly through security courtesy of business class check in (thank you Avios) and on to the BA lounge to enjoy the food and sample wines and whisky.

Straight onto the plane to be greeted with glasses of champagne. It was the mammoth Airbus A380 but you could not get a good idea of the scale of the beast.

Great food and even more drink helped ease away the 10 and a half hour flight to Los Angeles. The only downside was that we had middle row seats, so no windows to look out of and again, as I've said before, people sitting at window seats had their blind down for most of the journey.

I do like to look at the views and see the landscapes and seascapes or in this case icescapes we're passing over. Rather than watch movies or TV I have the interactive map on the display. To get this shot, which is somewhere over the high arctic of Canada I went downstairs over a rope to peer out of a tiny window so difficult was it to see outside and frustrating too.

A very smooth flight and descent into Los Angeles and a remarkably quick transit through all the customs and lines and paperwork and out to pick up the shuttle to our hotel for the one night before continuing on to Palm Springs tomorrow. The slowest wait was at the hotel check in, one desk open for dozens of people.

By the time we got to our room it was 8.30pm, we put out the light at 9.30pm which would be 5.30am back in the UK. A very long, thankfully safe and error free, day.