Tier Point Run to Sofia in Jul 2023: Day 2 – Heathrow to Home

By Nige on Sat 08 Jul 2023 at 23:15
Type: Post
Story: Tier Point Run to Sofia in Jul 2023
Tags: LHR | London | Trips

Even though we arrived into one of the central gates at T3, it always seems a heck of a walk to passport control! I was third off, but I scooted past the two in front of me, so that I had a free run to the border.

It’s quite common for me to arrive really late into the evening and there be no one in the UK passport queue (either for the kiosks or Seek Assistance), but there’s always a huge queue for the non-UK/EU passport queue. I assume there must be a late flight into T3 from some far-off place.

I by-passed the kiosks – I know by now it’s a waste of time even trying. I had to wake up the guy that needed to check my passport and then it seemed to take him a while to get my passport to scan. He also had to type some stuff in – i can imagine it was something like “definitely not the guy we are looking for”. Anyway, I was on my way soon enough.

I didn’t have to wait too long for the Business Parking mini-bus, so that was good. We picked up a few passengers with bags at T2 before the final drive to the car park. The driver didn’t seem to understand about driving smoothly – he was one of these that his foot was either on the accelerator pressed down to the floor, or his foot was off the accelerator altogether. Don’t they teach that basic skill in driving school now?

After deboarding at 23:10 or so, I was back at my car by 23:30, which I thought was pretty impressive, not that I can take any credit for that achievement!

The drive home was fairly easy, other having to deal with some ejit driving a Chrysler 300C with a souped-up engine. It sounded like a 5 litre V8 and everyone could hear when he pushed the pedal to the metal!

Unfortunately, there’s a huge difference between driving a poor-average car with a monster engine and an impressive, powerful but refined car. I could see there was a significant lag between hearing the increase in the engine noise and the point at which the car started to surge forward. Says everything about Chrysler vehicles! And very sad that the driver was trying to impress us with such a dreadful car.

The rest of the trip home was fine. I was tired when I arrived home at around 12:30am. The moggies didn’t bother trying to get out of the front door when I opened it, which suggested to me that something was up. Mango was in bed and Chutney was watching something going on in the garden, so I let him out of the back door. He was trepidatious to say the least and he didn’t stay out long.

That kerfuffel was enough to wake Vick, who was a bit bemused about what was going on.

Follow the whole story here: Tier Point Run to Sofia in Jul 2023