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July 31, 2005
Six and a Half Hours to London
This will be one of the last entries under “Relocating to London” because as of now, I’m no longer relocating but relocated. Here I am parked at the company flat in downtown London — Holborn actually, just above Westminster — and yes, I’m looking pretty baked. I’ve now been up for some 28 hours and I plan to go for another three or so more before calling Saturday/Sunday a day.
Our flight finally left the gate at around 7:30 PM EDT (12:30 AM BST). We had a smooth take-off to the north which is where we wanted to go so we didn’t have to make one of those climbing corkscrew turns I find so disconcerting. Staying with EDT, we were down to a thin band of twilight by 8:30 PM and full dark shortly after than but the first signs of dawn started showing up at around 12:30 AM making for a very short night. I’d downloaded a bunch of movies from MovieLink, which seems to work fine on my laptop though I haven’t had the courage to try it out on my PC again yet, but for the most part I just read.
Some new things I’d not seen before when flying: Flat panel displays on each seat back. No longer do a few CRTs drop down from the overhead compartments when the one in-flight movie is available. Now ever seat, except those lucky folks at the bulkheads, has it’s own small flat panel and a selection of several movies on various channels. As it happened, today’s movie choices were pretty foul. The “Are We There Yet?” display. Shown on the large screen on the bulkhead and available on one of the channels is a rotating display that shows the plane’s progress along the flight path, altitude and ground speed, outside weather conditions, as well as the current time at the departure point, present location and destination. Then there are the arm rest remotes used to control your seat back display and audio selections. Loathsome creatures who’s greatest accomplishment is to make the arm rest useless for its designed purpose.
The flight was mostly uneventful but for occasional turbulence. The pilots’ typical reaction to rough air is to try to get permission to climb out of it. By the time we were over Ireland, we were at 41,000 feet. This fact may have contributed to the somewhat abrupt descent into Gatwick. To kill speed and altitude the pilot deployed the breaks, made a heck of a racket. We touched down about ten minutes early and would probably have been at the gate bang on time had there not been a plane still occupying it. We ended up sitting on the taxi way for about fifteen minutes loosing most of the time we’d gained back during the flight.
I was on the starboard side for this flight and even though we spent most of our flight hugging whatever coast was available, I wasn’t able to see much of interest out my side. I did see the lights of Halifax go by early in the flight. Saw nothing of Ireland or Lands End. As we manuvered for landing I still didn’t see very much as, here’s a surprise, a heavy cloud cover obscured the greater London area. Nothing much could be seen until we were below 2,500 feet.
And what was my first view of England? It wasn’t the river Thames set off by an expansive city. What unfolded below the cloud deck was a landscape of small farms bounded by hedges with an occasional cottage or manner house thrown in for variety. Gatwick is quite a ways south of London and, although there are signs of sprawl along the rail route to London, outside that corridor, things look much as they’ve done for quite some time I imagine.
Filed under Relocating to London and Travel.
Posted by eric at July 31, 2005 12:27 PM