A Short Jaunt to the States, Part I

Just for a change, I have a good excuse for my lack of blogging recently... Well, OK, over the last week.

For the first time in about ten years I've had a proper holiday abroad... It was also my first holiday during that time that did not involve my parents (either in terms of financing the holiday or going along with me)... and my first ever proper holiday with my girlfriend. Since we don't seem to ever do things by halves, we travelled across the Pond to Los Angeles, to visit her best friend.

It had also been quite a few years since my girlfriend flew anywhere, and those flights were comparatively short. To get to LA, we'd be in the air for about eleven hours - slightly longer than I'd anticipated, but still better than the brain-melting eighteen hour flight to New Zealand I took with my parents many years ago. Getting to and through Heathrow was easy enough, but every trip abroad by plane reminds me how clumsy Heathrow's layout is. Getting from the Tube arrival point to the specific terminal is a slog, helped only a little by the use of travelators. Between those two points was the check-in desk, at which we got ourselves flagged for additional security checks later on because my girlfriend didn't have to hand any note of her friend's address in LA. All it really meant was that our carry-on luggage got a slightly more thorough investigation, we both got patted down, and I got scanned. Weirdly, the scanner thought it located something on my shoulder, hip and ankle, though obviously the guy who patted me down to confirm the scanner's findings wasn't able to locate anything untoward.

My girlfriend, having not been on a plane for so long, was nervous about the flight itself but, after a few moments of tense hand-holding, once she realised we were actually already in the air and on our way, she relaxed considerably. It helped, too, that in-flight entertainment has come on in leaps and bounds over the last decade. Last time I flew long-haul, you got maybe two different movies and a couple of terrible meals. Our flight to LA had a whole library of music, movies and TV shows as well as a few fairly basic videogames. I'd brought along two books and bought a third at Heathrow... I barely glanced at any of them over the course of the holiday.

Instead, I allowed myself to be introduced to the likes of Sleepy Hollow and Hannibal, a couple of new TV series that probably won't turn up on UK TV outside of the premium satellite channels for quite some time (OK, we've just got Gotham, which should inspire me with some confidence... but it doesn't) as well as watching a couple of movies. I don't even remember which movie I watched first, but I did get most of the way through Edge of Tomorrow before the PA kept interrupting to inform us of our impending arrival.

The meals on this flight were very impressive, all things considered. For the first meal, I had a roast chicken thing with veg while my girlfriend had the vegetarian option of pasta. The next was a simple selection of snacks, and 'breakfast' (we actually arrived in the evening) was a deep pan pizza.

Arrival in LA was, as has always been the case when I've travelled to the USA, a complete dream - simplicity itself, with very little wandering around. We'd made jokes, on our way through the airport, about how unfortunate an abbreviation LAX is for the airport, since it leads to signs indicating 'LAX SECURITY', which is surely not what one wants in an airport... thankfully, they all seemed on-the-ball, and certainly not as grumpy as those at the airport that kept an old schoolfriend of mine waiting about half an hour while they conducted a detailed search of his luggage simply because he'd made a joke. On our way through, we were photographed and officially fingerprinted, making another first for the both of us. We had to wait a while for our luggage to materialise, and my suitcase was a good few minutes behind my girlfriend's, but the worst thing that happened was that I dragged a second suitcase off the carousel along with mine, and another passenger was kind enough to throw it back on while I wrestled my case out of the way. My girlfriend had to answer a few questions at one point, as she'd indicated on a form that she was bringing in foodstuffs but, once it had been confirmed that none of it posed any threat to US agriculture, she was waved through.

We were expecting to be met at the airport by her friend, but parking outside the airport isn't easy - it's for pickup and dropoff only, so the car - driven by one of the friend's housemates - had to do a circuit of the terminals. I eventually caught sight of the friend outside while my girlfriend was double-checking inside the reception area of the terminal but we were off almost immediately.

Our first port of call was a sushi restaurant at The Americana in Glendale, where we met yet another friend of the friend and had a small dinner - all we could manage - before, almost keeling over from exhaustion, we were driven back to the apartment which was to be our base of operations for the week.

More to come, hopefully during the coming week...