SlyCat's Journal

Finally got home. The plane touched down around 10:20am, about an hour later than it should have due to taking off late at JFK. My parents kindly came to pick me up (Dad even took a half day off work to come collect me) and got to parents place around 1pm. I had a shower followed by a bit of a snooze while Mum washed my clothes and I only got back to the flat around 6pm. So glad to be home. I'll be typing up my notes and making a series of gigantic posts in the not too distant future.

Just to let folks know, we got up at 3.30am to get ourselves prepared and out the hotel in time for our flight. The flight is on time and we're all in the departure lounge. Got an hour before departure. No idea what we will do with our 13 hour stopover at NYC. Got to find somewhere to stick the luggage. Quite keen to see the terminal as featured in the film of the same name :). Not sure if we'll go to the city, may just get someplace to sleep unless we hook up with some furs or something

OK, we got ourselves a hotel room in the Hyatt hotel joining the airport. Delta didn't seem bothered at all about our situation but we got them to sort the flights out. Will be a long day tomorrow, much longer than today was supposed to be. I feel rather numb right now, I was feeling in a state of despair when I posted my previous post but now I don't know how I feel. The worst thing which could have happened, happened. We will get the cost of the hotel back on travel insurance minus excess. I will have to check my policy but I should be due some cash for the cancelled flight too.

Ah well I guess I just go with the flow now. Gotta get up early tomorrow for the flight and got ages at NYC. Should go see the city really, but the way I'm feeling now, I just want to be home.

A little behind on this one, I must do better! Anyway, as to what we did yesterday, we went to the Steel City Diner for breakfast. I had a 5 egg omelette while Kei has 3 gigantic pancakes and Tim had the special. Was quite tasty, might have to go there again, although I hear they ran out of some food last year :P. After that, we took a stroll around Pittsburgh going down Penn Avenue then up 6th Avenue, across the bridge and then followed the river up to the Heinz building before crossing back to the other side of the river. Was quite a peaceful walk up to this point. The other side of the river was apparantly what is called the Strip District where they have lots of random shops and restaurants. We picked up some sweets from what appeared to be a wholesale sweet shop as they only sold stuff in bulk before taking a wonder round on to Smallman Street, following it back to the hotel passing a costume shop on the way (which had hideous Simpsons suits amongst others).

Once we got back to the hotel, we found the bathroom floor was covered in water because the toilet was continuously flushing. I touched the handle where the water seemed to be coming from which stopped the flushing but we had already called for an engineer to look at it so when he came he just mopped up the water and cleaned up the bathroom. Following that excitement, we decided to go to the Showcase Cinemas in Robinson to see Ratatouille as the lady in the Disney store had recommended the day before. Had to get a taxi out there again which was another $25 each way but was much more convenient than getting the bus. It's a real shame the whole Robinson shopping area isnt more pedestrian friendly. They almost expect you to drive from one building to the neighbouring one. Anyway, the movie was great, another hit for Pixar. On a geeky side, the graphics get better and better, the food really did look real in some places :P

After the film, we walked down to TGI Friday's. Ordered some "Buffalo" chicken wings for starter which were too spicy and the sauce was too thick so we didn't eat much of those. My main was a serving of chicken and steak fajitas which were pretty nice if not spicy like Old El Paso fajitas, and salsa was sadly missing. Also only got 3 smallish tortillas which made it difficult to fit everything in. Had a fantastic drink to make up for the disappointments in the food department. It was a red bull shlushie. It really made me go "zing!" sugar sugar sugar from the syrup of the slushie mixed with the caffiene of the Red Bull. Lovely :)

After getting the taxi back, didn't do much for the rest of the evening. Possibly spotted a few furry arrivals in the lobby but that was about it.

Got to Heathrow at about 7:15am, having woken up at 5:30am. Went straight for the ticket desk queue which appeared pretty short but it still took me 45mins to get through it. I needed to go to this queue first to get my ticket for the second leg of the outgoing journey amended as they changed my flight number. After the long wait, they took about 20 seconds to look up the details and put a sticky label on the ticket... after that was the checkin queue which took another hour or so. By now, the time was 9:20am and the flight was boarding at 10:00am (despite leaving at 11:15am) so we made our way to the next queue, security. It was really really long but moved quite quickly so wasn't too long before we were through it. I didn't get pulled to one side for anything so was all good. In the other side of security, we wanted to get something to eat but didn't really have much time so we just got some sandwiches from Boots. I thought there might have been more shops at the departure lounge area but I was wrong. The vending machine wasn't even working. It wasn't long before we were bording the plane so it wasn't too bad. Once on the plane, it did seem like forever before we departed, which was more like 12 rather than the scheduled departure time of 11:15. However the flight managed to get ahead of schedule and we arrived pretty much before we were supposed to get there. The flight itself was OK, the inflight entertainment system was just the old videotape system so I just used it for the skymap and the occaisonal game of battleships which you could play against other seats.

At Chicago, we went through the Immigration booths and I always prepare for the worst. However the guy I got took my passport, asked why I was in Chicago (I said because I was transferring to Pittsburgh) and then went away for about 3 minutes with the passport, apparantly to ask someone a question or something. When he came back to his booth I asked what was wrong. He said nothing was wrong, he just had a joke he had to tell his colleague apparantly... I dunno, maybe he was making fun of the photo on my passport but when he returned, he was laughing which I've never seen an Immigration officer do before. He again asked why I was here and I again said I was just going on to Pittsburgh. He took my fingerprints and photo and sent me on my way without asking any further questions. I guess I got lucky with that :).

Our bags didn't appear on the carousel which made us think that maybe they had just transerred them to the next flight already. It didn't help when we asked someone there and he said "They'll probably appear tomorrow". Fortunately, we found someone useful who was a Virgin representative and he said our bags were next to another carousel for no apparant reason. Sure enough, there they were which was quite a relief. We went through customs and then to the United desk where they took our bags for the transfer and also issued a boarding pass thingy. Needed to get on the tram to terminal 1, everyting was so clean and shiny compared to the UK we noticed. Picked up a Cinnabon and ate that while waiting for the flight to begin boarding. We only had about an hour to wait so it wasn't so bad. I'm kinda glad we had the extra hour wait from our flight number being changed as it would have been quite close.

The flight to Pittsburgh itself was pretty quick and pain free. No frills but the seats were more comfortable than the Virgin Economy ones. On the other end, after another tram ride, we got to baggage claim and to my amazement, our bags appeared. I was amazed but at this point I thought they would have problems moving our bags about but it all went through without a hitch. As we were all pretty knackered and lazy, we just got the closest taxi. The taxi driver was a bit scary as she apparantly had road rage commenting on how other people can't drive and driving with one hand while using her mobile phone. We got to the Westin hotel in one piece though. I told Tim to tip her even if she was a bit scary. Anyway, we got checked in on the 7th floor, put our bags down and collapsed on the "heavenly beds". I signed up for the "high speed" wi-fi as the free wifi is 128k. Turned out the high speed is only 1mbit but I used it to grab the last episode of Doctor Who which we watched before going to bed.