UK Trip Report: To Harlow, Essex

So here I am, in the UK. In England. In a little town called Harlow in the Essex county. There’s quite a bit of snow (London standards, not very much for Amherst) and I haven’t been out and about a whole lot.

I thought I’d start things off a quite trip report, with pictures and captions laid out in chronological order.

I met Nicole (another intern at Hampshire College) at Bradley Airport in Hartford, CT, and was surprised to learn that she was taking the same flight to Atlanta (and flying on to California). I was progressively less surprised each time we met another one of the dozen or so Hampshire students at the airport. Was a bit of a party, really.

I was really excited to get on an MD88. I’m sure Delta are phasing these out pretty quickly. Soon we’ll talk about these McDonnell Douglas aircraft in the past tense. Maybe even in the plus-que-parfait! (Oh no!)

But these aircraft are old. It showed. On board flight 1804 en route to Atlanta (ATL), photo by Nicole:

I was apprehensive about my transatlantic flight on Delta’s 777. Memories of my flight with United flight from Sydney earlier in the year with no seat-back entertainment and the five-hour cross-country SFO to IAD flight with no food service (at all, zip!) gave me little reason to believe Delta’s service would deliver. It was my first time flying Delta, but the reviews weren’t encouraging.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t bad.

There were personal entertainment systems on coach seat backs (about 20 movies, a dozen TV show episodes, music and games), the flight attendants weren’t grumpy at all (on the contrary, they seemed rather cheery) and the food wasn’t particularly bad. They served us dinner and drinks as soon as we took off, then drinks at various intervals, and break fast prior to landing.

Chicken teriyaki dinner:

At around 8am, which was late to begin with given we were supposed to land an hour earlier, the captain tells us that thanks to snow (and quite a lot of it it seemed), the airport was actually closed (yikes!) and that we’d probably have to divert to some other airport. (I later learned that Luton was closed the entire day that day, and it would have had to be Heathrow).

Soon we get word that we will probably be able to land at Gatwick after an hour, when the airport reopened. “We have just about enough fuel to hold on for that amount of time”, the captain assured us.

Finally at 9am or so we touched landed on the blinding whiteness that was Gatwick Airport at 9am on Friday.

Made my way towards passport control at Gatwick:

Took a shuttle to the North terminal, where the trains are:

Decided I was hungry, and bought a croissant and a latte for £2.95 (”le petit dej: un croissant et un café,” read the sign; funny that the first thing I order in the UK happened to be in French):

Eventually reached Victoria Plaza. Decided I wanted lunch and, seeing Oporto (the portuguese-theme Aussie chicken Burger chain from Bondi beach), went for a hot and spicy burger. Previous to this, I bought a cheap Virgin Mobile cellphone for £19.95 (with £10 credit) and set it up as enjoyed meat on bread: