Our plane to Heathrow, Boeing 767-400
Our cruise from South Hampton, England to NYC began Sunday in
Houston. The first task of the day was to get Tanner to Susan L, who keeps him
while we travel. He knew something was
up when we got in the car and began shaking. By the time we got to Susan's, he
calmed down because he saw his big Irish wolfhound playmates. We are so fortunate to have Susan to keep him
for us.
We were off to the airport by 2pm leaving us with plenty of
time to park, check our bags, and relax in the Continental United (!) Club
for a couple of hours. The weather
turned really stormy and for a while we saw no flights landing or taking off. We
later heard inbound flights had to circle for over an hour. This did not delay
ours, thankfully, so right on time at 5:15 we headed over to the departure gate
and boarded a United Boeing 767 for the 9 hour flight to London. We were in a
two-seater row with Mary Alice at the window seat. To be fair, she offered it
over to me first.
My personal flight plan was to watch a few movies but my screen quit on me after the second one. So I checked out one of the three books I
brought and promptly dozed off. Coach seats are not conducive to sleeping well,
that's for sure. And dinner wasn't so
great either, rubber chicken or vegetarian raviolis. Didn't eat much.
Just prior to landing we were served "breakfast", a
soggy warm roll, fruit and coffee. The only other problem we faced (besides
food) was the 1/2 mile walk from the aircraft to the UK passport control and
then the more than one hour wait before we finally got to the front of the
line. But then, England is on "high alert". We get it! We did observe
a few folks singled out and taken somewhere else
Finally we got to our bags, located the Princess Rep, waited
for the bus for the 90-minute ride to the ship.
Did I mention we were really jet lagged? Whew! Once aboard the Ruby
Princess we went straight to our cabin #P211 on Deck 5. It's a great location
because the coffee bar and gourmet cafe are just steps away. But we were really
tired so we headed up to the 15th floor buffet and enjoyed some prime rib and
salad for supper. That was about all we could handle, having been mostly up and
awake for 24+ hours.
Our room service coffee arrived Tuesday morning and we got
organized to go meet another couple from San Antonio who MA had met prior
departure on the ship blog. We are doing
our three shore excursions in Iceland with them.
I left to check out the "Advanced Photography
Class" offered at 10am and learned it was just a basic class so I ducked
out and we went to Trivial Pursuit instead. We then headed for a CSI presentation lecture. The
guy did pretty good considering he'd only served as CSI investigator for 22
years! Afterwards, I introduced myself.
He seemed impressed by my 33 years as a Homicide Investigator.
Stay tuned! More later.
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| Flight Deck Boeing 767 |
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Port of South Hampton, England |
Jan and I are glad you arrived safely. Take lots of pictures especially the pictures of the erupting volcano! Just don't get too close
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