Airports and Airplanes

With everything done it was time to head out for the trip. Thomas and I left Santa Fe around 6:30pm to head down to Albuquerque to begin our journey to England. Our flight wasn't until 11:57pm but we decided to stop and get some dinner before making our way to the Sunport. For dinner we stopped at Pappadeaux's. I really like this restaurant and we haven't been there in a long time and I was glad we stopped here. The food was as good as I remember and it was nice having a great dinner before our flight to New York. After eating we headed to the parking at the airport and then took the shuttle. We were early and the desk for jetBlue wasn't open yet so we just sat and read for a while. When the employees arrived we checked our bags in and then went through security. Everything was quiet this late and things went quickly. Once at the gate we read until it was time to board the plane. This was an overnight flight to JFK and Thomas and I tried to sleep. It turned out that neither of us slept very well. It is hard to sleep on a plane when you are seated upright and there is really no place to put your head. The flight was uneventful and we landed in New York around 5:30am. We picked up our bags and then found out where our connecting flight was taking off. We had to make our way from Terminal 5 to Terminal 4 which turned out to be a few minutes walk. At Terminal 4 we found the bag storage area so that we could leave our luggage somewhere so we didn't have to haul it around all day. We got that all settled and then went to find something to eat. There weren't many options and we ended up at Central Diner. We took our time eating since we had all day and had coffee and talked about the trip. After eating we went and found where the Virgin Atlantic check-in was located then we needed to find a place to sit and wait. It was too early to check in and finding chairs to sit in and wait proved to be challenging. Finally we found some at the AirTrain area. Here we read and watch a show on our iPad. Unfortunately that did really take up all that much time so we decided to get on the AirTrain and ride around the airport a few times. Once back at Terminal 4 we just sat and waited for Bell Motel to call us.

Around 11:00am we got a call from Bell Motel and she had arrived in Terminal 5. We told her where we were and she made her way to Terminal 4. After she got her bags checked in we all grabbed a taxi and went to Forest Park to find some boxes. We needed to occupy our time until later in the day. The taxi dropped us off right at the beginning spot for Many Attractions of Forest Park. This is a 25 box series on about a mile hike. We spent a little over two hours looking for these boxes and ended up finding 23 of the 25. When we were done we found a place to call for a taxi to get back to the airport. Here we went to the baggage storage and got our luggage and the made our way upstairs to get checked in. It didn't take long since we had checked in online and had our boarding passes already. All we had to do was get the bags checked. Then we went through security which seemed a little disorganized and took about 25 minutes. Once through security we made our way to Gate A3 to meet up with the group for the flight to London. Everyone was there so we said our hellos and then just visited until it was time for boarding.

They started the boarding at around 5:30pm and things went smoothly. The Captain made an announcement about how we had to wait until 6:30pm for takeoff because we couldn't land in London too early. Then he made another announcement about backup at JFK and we were waiting to be able to leave. In the end we left about an hour late. The flight was long and Thomas and I tried to sleep but it wasn't that great and we only got a little shut eye. During the flight we had some dinner, watched a couple of movies and read. Finally at 6:40am we arrived in London. Then we went through Customs and gathered our bags. Once everyone had their things we made our way to the Arrival Hall to meet with the car rental people to get the vans so that we could begin our trip. We are now in England and the journey begins.