Start of my Trip

Well I woke up in the morning thanks to a sticky front door, having slept through 3 alarms.

Legged it to the bus station (via taxi) and slept a couple of hours on the bus with "interesting" seats. Someone came up with the idea of some lovely fake leather seats which fired you off each time the bus braked. Not too bad, apart from waking up being garroted by the seat belt.

Arriving at T5 a whole 3 hours (Yes that's right people, I was EARLY), I dumped my bags and headed airside. Discovered that T5 is pretty good as airports go, hung around a bit, made some phone calls and bought tobacco for Plum. Apparently I could have bought 2kg, but figured that was a little excessive.

The flight was ok, managed to get lucky with my seat as I had a completely uncluttered floor in front of me and could stretch fully out without making contact with anything! :)

Arrival at Newark led to an interesting chat with an immigration official though. Who would have thought that a 4 week holiday would sound that suspicious? This led to questions about my employment in the UK and whether I was planning on working over here.

After that it was a short hop to the car hire place to pick up my "compact" which is in fact a 4-door Ford Focus Saloon. The drive started interestingly as my GPS receiver didn't pick up signals, so was navigating by guess work and headed in the vaguely right direction.

After a 5 minute stop in a random town, with slightly dodgy youths walking past, I got my satellite fix and continued my journey (which I'd vaguely followed the correct route on) to Rachel's house. Once more my US driving luck kicked in and I spent an hour plus stuck in a traffic jam on Route 80 at 9pm! Joy!

Got there safely though, at about 10:30, so my nice 24 hour day ended.