New York; Thursday, 13 April, 2017

I’d booked a half days leave and had been working from home for the morning so I was able to set off for the airport as soon as I hit shutdown on my laptop.

I had a smooth journey across London to Heathrow and was dropping my bag off three hours before departure time, only to find that the flight had just been delayed by two hours.

In the end I had nearly four hours to kill in the terminal building before we were finally called to go to the gate in the B satellite terminal and then onto a bus out to the jet.

Once on board the pilot finally explained the reason for the delay – the original plane had developed a fault on its way into Heathrow in the morning which required a major fix so they had had to swap over the jets for one which was being kept as a hot-spare, but it had needed much longer to be gotten ready for departure (probably a good dusting as well).

So two hours late we finally pushed back from the stand, headed for the runway and took off into the spring afternoon sunshine.

It was a smooth flight across the Atlantic, and we could make up a little bit of the lost time, but we were still more than 90 minutes late by the time we landed and it was starting to get dark as we taxied to the stand.

I had heard lots of horror stories of the time it takes to get through US immigration, in particular at JFK. I don’t know if the delay had helped, if it was just quiet or that things had improved, but I was through immigration in around 25 minutes and quickly afterwards had my bag and was through customs to the arrivals lounge where I checked in for my shuttle to the hotel.

We had to wait about 20 minutes for the shuttle, which also then proceeded to wander round the other terminals picking up other passengers and then, despite the fact it was close to 22:30, got stuck in traffic on the way into New York.

By the time I got to the hotel it was gone 11pm local time (I was trying to ignore the fact that I’d been up since before 6 and in effect it was now 4am back in the UK), so after checking in I headed straight for my room and turned in for the night without even unpacking.