In the air again

Early start this morning, a quick emotional farewell to Barking's folks and then off to Heathrow. We had a bit of drama finding the hire car company to drop off the hire car. The supplied instructions were rubbish but luckily the Garmin GPS came to the rescue.

More drama at the hire company as they hadn't been told anything about the accident our hire car was involved in on Christmas Eve. My car was parked outside my brothers house, unfortunately his neighbour didn't spot it when he reversed out of his driveway (it was very small a Citroen C2). Anyway I reported the accident to the rental company and gave all the details at the time. I expected that this would have been passed on to the depot that we were dropping the car into - wrong. They knew nothing about it, and couldn't find anything on the system about it - brilliant! I then spent half an hour going through the details again. We were getting stressed about making it through Heathrow security before our plane dpearted. As it turned out we had no bother at customs, much easier than I had been led to believe. The customs guys were great, they had a laugh and a joke with us and we were straight through in record time, no queuing.

I even had time to buy a pair of swanky Bose headphones for the trip back. Would have loved to buy the noise reductions model but couldn't justify the extra expense, these took enough justification.

We had a few problems with air traffic control in Frankfurt which made us late, luckily our connecting flight waited for us. However the quick change of flights meant I hadn't blipped, so I took this photo of my new purchase on the plane to Tokyo.