We flew back to Atlanta on Tuesday, Oct 27. Shelly left to go back to work yesterday, so we have the place to ourselves. We woke up about 08:30 and had leftover Chinese for breakfast, from last night's dinner, and had a leisurely morning packing. We arranged for the AZ car to pick us up at 11:45 AM. Our flight is at 15:00 out of Heathrow airport terminal 4. This will give us plenty of time to get to the airport, navigate security and do some duty free shopping and then head to the Delta Sky Team lounge and relax before the flight.
Being in international business class we had priority checkin and security lines, and everything went as planned and we picked up some scotch in the duty free and had about 30 minutes to relax in the lounge before boarding began. Pat searched for some sunscreen but she was unable to find what she was looking for. The European sunscreens have different ingredients.
The Delta flight 0031 was great. We found our seats in 3A and 3B and settled in. The crew were very attentive and addressed us by name. The food on this flight was much better than the food on the Virgin Atlantic flight, and it kept coming. It got to a point where we were turning down food. It seemed like they were feeding us none stop. They served a French Bordeaux which was fabulous.
The flight seemed to take a long time, over 8 hours I believe. Mark read the entire Demystifying the Bombe (Bletchley Park) book, some parts twice, and also watched the Minions movie. Pat did some reading as well "Do androids dream of electric sheep" and she listened to Eva Cassidy. We both also took about a 30 minute nap at one point.
International customs and border patrol in Atlanta has been updated since the last time we came through two years ago. We were one of the first off of the plane, and the customs area is now self help machines. You scan your passport and answer a few questions, then it takes a picture of you. When completed it prints a receipt and you take that to a customs officer. He asked a few more questions and that was it. Off to luggage collection which is now right around the corner. When we got to the carousel our luggage was just coming out. We picked up our luggage and on to the next stop, the agriculture inspection station. Nothing at all happened here, other than a man collected our receipts from earlier. Out the door and Maggie was there waiting on us. :-) The entire off boarding process hardly took any time at all.
We got home and Sherlock and Watson were waiting for us in our home. Brian and Ria had gone out to play trivia and they put the dogs into our home so they would be there when we got home. They stopped by after trivia and visited for a while.
We unpacked and put most things away. We got to bed about 11:30, or about 3:30 AM London time. There is a 4 hour difference right now as London changed a few days ago, but the USA does not change until this weekend.
We woke up this morning about 8:30, so we got a good 9 hours of sleep. We both feel good and not tired. It is MUCH BETTER to fly across the pond in the daytime instead of at night. At night you really do not get much sleep and then the entire next day when you arrive is just a wasted day because you are so tired. Flying back in the day uses the entire day, but the next day you are fine. Either way you lose a whole day in travel, but if possible I am definitely going to try to fly over to Europe in the daytime next time instead of over night.
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