Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012: Day 1 – Home to Frankfurt to New York

Gill dropped us off at Manchester Airport about an hour ago, and we are now settled in the lounge at Terminal 1 waiting for our flight.  It’s nice and quiet here. Will add more to this post during the day.

Next update likely to be when we get to Frankfurt.  Going to see whether we can get into the Senator lounge with paper evidence of being a Gold member of Star Alliance (*A) – looking forward to a fight!  Failing that we will end up in the Tower Lounge in Terminal A.

Typical Lufthansa – plane offloads at the extremity of the airport – felt like we would taxi straight onto the neighbouring motorway!  No buses waiting for us either.  Feeling a Mr Grumpy mood coming on…

Arrived at Frankfurt and missed the fight to get in the Senator lounge. Now in the Tower lounge and its packed. No seats with sockets right now so will have to be patient…

Also no Starbucks nearby, so Mrs B is not amused.

So we have finally got to NYC – we are only staying one night at the DoubleTree close to JFK and it’s not the best hotel in the world!  Relatively small rooms but it’s a place to sleep!

We landed around 7pm and after being driven by one of those funny motorized vehicles into a gate 100 yards away we knew things weren’t going to be straightforward.  We expected a 2 hour wait to get through immigration but after a quick dash from the plane there was hardly anyone there!  We were well chuffed, until we met Jones the immigration agent, who was the slowest immigration officer on the planet.  We arrived one of the first into the immigration line and we were the very last to leave!  He seemed drunk and insisted on telling us all about everyone he has ever “processed” through immigration with names the same (or similar) to ours, and there were a fair few.

I don’t think we were expecting too much when we got into the taxi and expected the taxi driver to know where the hotel was!  We had to look the address up on his Sat Nav and tell him which destination to go for.  Then he couldn’t follow the directions and kept going wrong.  It was only 5 mins down the road!

Anyway whinging now over.  The TV is on Friends (good for Mrs B), we are on Wi-Fi and we are planning to go out for a quick walk before going to sleep.

Stats for Day 1: 0 miles.

Plan for tomorrow is to spend a day in NYC and then our late flight to LA.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Pacific West Coast in Jun 2012