What a day! All that was required was a simple flight over to the States on Sunday 16th, for a few days work trip to San Francisco. Was it that easy/straight forward? Of course not.

Getting to Terminal 5 was easy, quick and quiet drive, plenty room in car park and no wait for a bus to the terminal. All sounding easy so far. After checking my bag in I wondered off and ridiculously randomly bumped into Dan M and his lady, a school friend who was popping over to New York for a week holiday.

Second weird thing I noticed was a group of Americans, who had loads of music gear to check in. From a closer inspection they had clearly just played at Download festival and were heading back to the states. Still haven’t been able to work out how they were though, best guesses from pictures on Download website suggests either A Day To Remember or Alesana. Unfortunately neither have a blog which I can link to and see if it was them.

Once my flight gate popped up it was time to stop stalking the emo band and move on. Whilst walking to the gate an Irish chap started chatting at me, so ended up wondering down to the gate with him. Before being interrupted by the Duty Free guy offering us a free cocktail, its 10am, who wants a cocktail at this time? Me! He whipped up some lemon thing with fancy vodka, as you can see his sales pitch worked well on me, I’ve remembered everything about his product. Woops. Strange incident number two, this Irish chap happened to be called Colin too and was seated a row behind me on the plane (admittedly on the other side).

Boarded plane, sat next to a 60 year old Indian lady who didn’t move other than to let the guy by the window out. The guy I’m sure is some form of social media geezer, he had a Firefox Tshirt on and read “The Google Story” book. So it that was you in seat 49J of flight BA285 get in touch.

Landed (yay) as per usual, and got off quick fast to try and get through security nice and quickly. A few more questions than normal and I was through, I blame the flip flops and shorts, now onto luggage claim. As normal, gotta wait around for a few minutes before the bags start flowing around on the conveyor belt. As they started flowing through I started watching out for mine, and watching and watching and watching. After 30 mins and there only being one bag left on the conveyor I gave up. Walked over to the luggage complaints/enquiries desk where a very slow BA employee had been lumbered with everything to deal with. She was very helpful and tracked my luggage, apparently it was on the plane. Not like everyone else’s which had been moved to the flight later that day. After another hour or so they finally found my luggage somewhere out the back, no idea where or why it wasn’t just put on the conveyor but I don’t care. There was nothing missing so I just left the airport for the easy trip to the hotel.

A short limo ride later, yes limo, well normal car with sweets and drinks, I was at the hotel. Quickly checked in and Galbo came down to meet me, this was the extent of his exercise for the day.

Got upstairs to my room on the 29th floor, walk in, and there is some luggage in the room. WTF? Why is there luggage in my room which isn’t mine? Rang reception who explained that the room had already been setup for a guest arriving later that day and that I would have to move. No real big deal, hopped down to the 14th floor which is where I now came to rest. Here’s the view from my window below. I think that pretty much wraps up the day, I am going to do a separate post about the dinner I had in a minute.