Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Departing Houston for South Hampton, Beginning our Westward Trans-Atlantic

Our plane to Heathrow, Boeing 767-400


Our cruise from South Hampton, England to NYC began Sunday in Houston. The first task of the day was to get Tanner to Susan L, who keeps him while we travel.  He knew something was up when we got in the car and began shaking. By the time we got to Susan's, he calmed down because he saw his big Irish wolfhound playmates.  We are so fortunate to have Susan to keep him for us.
We were off to the airport by 2pm leaving us with plenty of time to park, check our bags, and relax in the Continental United (!) Club for a couple of hours.  The weather turned really stormy and for a while we saw no flights landing or taking off. We later heard inbound flights had to circle for over an hour. This did not delay ours, thankfully, so right on time at 5:15 we headed over to the departure gate and boarded a United Boeing 767 for the 9 hour flight to London. We were in a two-seater row with Mary Alice at the window seat. To be fair, she offered it over to me first.
My personal flight plan was to watch a few movies but my  screen quit on me after the second one.  So I checked out one of the three books I brought and promptly dozed off. Coach seats are not conducive to sleeping well, that's for sure.  And dinner wasn't so great either, rubber chicken or vegetarian raviolis.  Didn't eat much.
Just prior to landing we were served "breakfast", a soggy warm roll, fruit and coffee. The only other problem we faced (besides food) was the 1/2 mile walk from the aircraft to the UK passport control and then the more than one hour wait before we finally got to the front of the line. But then, England is on "high alert". We get it! We did observe a few folks singled out and taken somewhere else
Finally we got to our bags, located the Princess Rep, waited for the bus for the 90-minute ride to the ship.  Did I mention we were really jet lagged? Whew! Once aboard the Ruby Princess we went straight to our cabin #P211 on Deck 5. It's a great location because the coffee bar and gourmet cafe are just steps away. But we were really tired so we headed up to the 15th floor buffet and enjoyed some prime rib and salad for supper. That was about all we could handle, having been mostly up and awake for 24+ hours.
Our room service coffee arrived Tuesday morning and we got organized to go meet another couple from San Antonio who MA had met prior departure on the ship blog.  We are doing our three shore excursions in Iceland with them.
I left to check out the "Advanced Photography Class" offered at 10am and learned it was just a basic class so I ducked out and we went to Trivial Pursuit instead. We then  headed for a CSI presentation lecture. The guy did pretty good considering he'd only served as CSI investigator for 22 years! Afterwards, I introduced myself.  He seemed impressed by my 33 years as a Homicide Investigator.
Stay tuned! More later.




Flight Deck Boeing 767







Port of South Hampton, England




1 comment:

  1. Jan and I are glad you arrived safely. Take lots of pictures especially the pictures of the erupting volcano! Just don't get too close

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