We woke at 0600 to take the bus to the airport for our 0910 flight to London Heathrow. That kind of wake up time isn’t normally an issue for me but having had sleep-ins for the last few days, it was harder. We had two pleasant surprises in a row.
- The first was finding a lounge we could use before the flight. Even at that early hour in the lounge, I was extremely productive. I had received an email from Jetstar upon waking up, saying that my flight next year has been rescheduled. An immediate connection in Singapore (AKL-SIN-KUL) has become an overnight. Strangely, the original flight still exists. An online chat through their website while in the lounge resolved this and I was reinstated to the original time. The chat agent wasn’t any wiser than me but I suspect that my SIN-KUL flight was cancelled necessitating an overnight, but was then reinstated (but without me on it).
- Then the second pleasant surprise was the delicious hot breakfast (omelette, bacon, egg and grilled tomato) on the short 1h25 British Airways flight (quicker actually).
As usual, luggage at Heathrow took forever even though it was a domestic flight parked near the carousel. It took about 45 minutes for us to get to the Heathrow Express for the 4 minute ride to T1.
Air New Zealand normally opens its counter 4h30 prior to the flight and we should have been able to walk straight up for check-in. But today, they had a meeting which meant that it opened only 3h30 prior, so we had a brief wait at the front of the queue.
We were the first to check-in. Fortunately, we were given our boarding passes straight away, without having to wait for all confirmed passengers to check-in. We were airside 3h before the flight and were in the Servisair lounge soon after.
The flight was packed but being daylight all the way, we weren’t too uncomfortable. Arrivals in Los Angeles was a shambles though, with the queue-management through immigration. A couple of airport officers changed the snake-queue from time to time, resulting in people at the back suddenly being taken to the front of newly-opened counters … much to the anger of people who had been queueing for a long time. However, things looked worse than they actually were, as we only took an hour to clear formalities at LAX. It had taken Kim more than 3 hours the last time.
We took the shuttle to the Super 8 motel for a good night sleep.