Los Angeles

We left on time and finally left British soil just before 12.30pm.

I had lunch, watched a film, and then one of the cabin crew came over to me and she said something that I wasn't expecting: "I'm going to be sleeping with you, later.  But first, my other colleague will be sleeping with you."  Apparently, the normal crew quarters were unusable, so they'd reserved the seat next to me for crew rest through the flight.

Even though it was daytime, we had a few hours of "night" after we'd had lunch and then we had a light lunch just before arriving.

I don't normally fly direct to the Western USA, so it was a different route to usual, up over Manchester and. Glasgow, Greenland, Winnipeg, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and, finally arriving in Los Angeles just before 3pm local time (scheduled arrival was 3.30pm)

I used the machine to get my customs receipt, rather than filling in the blue form, but still had to do the normal immigration process with an official - there was some technical problem with the terminal that meant it couldn't completely automate it.

Fortunately, the SuperShuttle stop is just by the exit from customs, and although I had to wait 20 minutes for my van to arrive, I was on the road less than an hour after touching down.  It took an hour to get to the hotel with lots of heavy traffic, even on a Saturday afternoon.