Arrived in Oakland

It's been a long day, but I've arrived safely in Oakland.

Having completed the Roku Fantasy Football draft just before 2am, I was able to get a little bit of sleep before I was picked up at 6am for the journey to the airport.  Surprisingly for a weekday morning rush hour, it only took 2 hours to get to Heathrow - even my chauffeur, Daniel, was surprised at that!

From long experience, I didn't rush down to the gate as soon as boarding was announced as being underway.  I had already noticed that my flight was due to leave from the gate immediately opposite the entrance to the lounge, so no long walk to the end of the concourse, for a change!  I went down 10 minutes after boarding commenced and found nobody waiting except the gate staff - they'd got everybody on board in under 10 minutes as it was a half-empty flight today, even up front.

We departed on time and toured the taxiways of Heathrow for half an hour before actually taking off and heading off over Scotland, Greenland and northern Canada before coming down the west coast of the USA.  The flight tracker on board shows you the route on a globe so you can see why a direct route seems to be along a curve.

The first lunch was excellent - I had opted for the chicken with BBQ sauce, garlic potatoes and asparagus (the a roll, two salads as usual) and then the ice cream pudding.  I did get quite a lot of sleep I think, or at least rest.  I played some of the games on the system too.  The Beefburger Wellington lunch was served an hour before landing.  Although you cannot watch YouTube using the in-flight wi-fi, you can stream radio, so I was able to have Classic FM on all the way.  I got today's Famous Five clue straight away just as we started taxiing, but I'm not staying up until 2.30am tonight to text the link, which I got on Monday anyway!

Although we touched down early at about 1.10pm, we didn't actually get to the gate until 1.55pm as, first, there was another plane using it, and second we had to wait for a tug to go the last bit.  20 minutes after stepping off the plane, I was sitting on the train to Oakland. and now I'm in my hotel room in Oakland, looking for an early dinner.