Sunday. GT2 Day 1. London.
My alarm went off at three thirty this morning. Ugh. This is going to be such a long day. We did pretty well getting ready and out the door. It was just minutes after four when we got the rental Nissan Versa on the road and underway.
The drive down to New York City went super smoothly. No traffic, no issues, good weather. We did so well that we were well ahead of schedule when we arrived, getting all of the way down to JFK before eight in the morning! Because we were driving so far, we had allowed ourselves more like five hours to get to the airport, just in case anything went wrong like leaving late or hitting traffic. But it all went perfectly smoothly leaving us at the airport nearly five hours before our flight!
We dropped off the car at Enterprise, which we know really well at this point, and took their shuttle bus to Federal Circle, and the bus (because as always, the train is down for maintenance) to the airport.
Our first issue of travel came up when we went to check in for our Norwegian flight to London. We had misunderstood the wording of the weight allowances and we had to shed about a dozen kilos of total weight and check that. So we had to rebalance our bags and check one for an additional hundred dollars. Hardly tragic, but a rough start and Dominica was pretty grumpy. But it means that she didn’t have to carry a backpack all day like the other three of us did. So not all bad.
We got right through security and were at the terminal awaiting our flight. We had hours and hours to kill. Emily and I did some filming while we were there because there was nothing else to do. Filming in airports is awful, but it is also a good use of the time. We got some food there. I had avoided eating all morning because of all of the traveling that we were going to be doing, but the falafel wrap from Eat & Go just looked too good (and it was delicious.) This Eat & Go is new at JFK since the last time that we were there, but it has a sister location in Istanbul that I have eaten at in the past.
It was a long wait, but everyone had energy as we are off on our adventure. Thankfully our flight was on time and we were off to London!
On the flight we were two and two. Dominica and I sat together, Madeline and Emily sat across the aisle from us. We had an Airbus A320-300 which was basically an antique, but it was clean and very high end and loaded with amenities, which was nice. We had in flight entertainment. I managed to watch the new Tomb Raider movie which I liked, and I watched the new Blade Runner 2049 film which was very good. I knew that there wasn’t enough time to finish a third movie so I watched most of We’re the Millers which I have seen previously and enjoyed. With the movies, the flight seemed to take no time at all. It was only a seven hour flight, after all, and it felt like we were almost immediately in London.
We landed at London Gatwick just after midnight. We will be here for the next several hours. Time to find a pub and get a little London experience before heading on to Greece.