We are human again. Shower, brush teeth and coffee is all it takes. This message brought to you by Kathleen typing and Joe commenting!<\/p>\n
After about 5 hours of sleep we got up at 3am on Thursday to be ready for our taxi at 4am. They usually show up a bit early which is nice. Off to the airport and ready to check in. The flight was ok, other than being seated in the children’s area, and not very crowded at all. Instead of sleeping though we watched stupid movies. [Joe: didn’t get amazing amounts of food. Kathleen erm, yes we did. Two meals. Joe: no we didn’t. Wasn’t two meals. Kathleen: right, breakfast (omlette or french toast, so-so), and then later a sandwich, crisps and chocolate. Two meals.] Got to Washington a few minutes late, then had to mess with immigration (other than the pointless fingerprinting and photographing rather painless), customs, drop off the bag, and more security, so by the time we got through all that and into the departure area, found out where to go, we ended up having to run. So we ran through 3\/4s of the length of Washington Dulles airport. After no sleep. And an 8 hour flight. Made the gate and there was only the woman taking the tickets. She smiled and said ‘it’s ok you’ve got 8 minutes!’<\/p>\n
We got on the plane and fell into our seats. Then asked for water. A few minutes after us a bloke (who was behind us in the immigration queue) got on gasping and sweating (probably about how we looked), fell into his seat, and asked for water. Joe and I started giggling. Then the woman beside the other bloke said, loud enough for most of the plane to hear, ‘this poor man has just run from England!’<\/p>\n
Philadelphia airport is probably one of the most confusing I’ve been in but we finally found baggage claim. Of course, we made our flight but our bags didn’t. The upside to this is they said they would deliver the bags to us. Fine by us. And the bags did arrive later in the evening.<\/p>\n
Allison turns up just as we’ve sorted the luggage and, yea! took over sorting the luggage delivery. Very welcomed as I was about asleep on my feet at this point. Turns out she’d arrived at the airport about 20 minutes before that but spent most of that time trying to find parking.<\/p>\n
It appears we picked the day Clinton and Bush sr arrived in Philadelphia. [Joe: all the important people show up at the same time.] So the airport was crowded, lots of extra security, and roads were closed including the interstate. But we had a nice drive back to Allison’s house and got to see a bit of the area.<\/p>\n
On the drive we were talking about what we wanted to do and of course we said we’d have to try a cheesesteak. So we stopped and got one as we were starving. These were huge sandwiches. [Joe: mince beef and onions with cheese on a soft bagette roll. Excellent.] For the rest of the afternoon\/evening we just tried to stay awake. Determined to stay awake until it got dark. So we sat and drank beer\/wine and talked bollocks and yawned. Allison made us a lovely dinner and then we fell asleep. The bags arrived after we fell asleep so we woke up this morning to luggage. Hooray.<\/p>\n