Fast Flights and Fast Cars

Day Nine 5/18/09
Fast Flights and Fast Cars

Last night Nicole and I mapped out the best way for me to get to Paddington to catch the express back to Heathrow. As previously noted London shuts down at night. The Tube is closed from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. I wanted to catch the 5 a.m. train out of Paddington so I had to take a bus to the station.

The check-in line was a breeze, as was customs, and I was in the international line within 20 minutes of arriving at Heathrow. The food in international lounges out of the country is always better than international lounges within the country. I had a really good “healthy” cereal. It was sweet grainy, nutty, goodness. And then I also had a bowl of Coco Krispies. The only knock I have on this lounge is that its soda cans were of the 4 oz variety. I am pretty sure that I could have built a house of cans with a longer stay in the lounge.

The flight home was awesome. First class was full, business class was full, and steerage class was full. Steerage class is what I call coach, coach. There is also Economy Plus coach. Fortunately, I was seated in Economy Plus. Economy Plus has eight rows of seven seats (2-3-2) for a total of 56 seats. Economy plus had eight passengers on our flight. It was great. I hopped in a three seat section, flipped up the arm rests and slept for the majority first of the flight. If I could always have three coach seats, there would be no need to fly business or first ever again.

We arrived in D.C. about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. I intentionally booked an extra long layover so that I could go to lunch with a friend in D.C. After clearing customs, rechecking my bags, and a quick stop in the Red Carpet Room, I was off to meet Preston.

Since Preston is the D.C. resident I let him pick our destinations. The only thing I would have REALLY wanted to do was hoop hunt in downtown D.C. but we didn’t have time to go there and get me back to IAD for my flight to Philly. We first went to lunch at a place called CheeBurger CheeBurger. It was really good. It’s a fun menu because it’s basically just a ton of ingredient choices to mix in match in burgers, shakes and sodas. According to Preston peanut butter is really good on burgers. I stayed with fairly conservative ingredients like cheese, lettuce, tomato, pineapple and ketchup. For my soda a had diet pepsi with sugar free raspberry syrup. I thoroughly enjoyed both.

After lunch we had roughly another hour and half before I had to be back at the airport. Again, that wasn’t enough time to go too far but fortunately for Preston one of his favorite places in the world was located near by. We went to the Ferrari and Lamborghini dealership. One of Preston’s dreams is to own a Lambo. I can’t say I completely get this because even if you have say $100M, $250K for a car seems excessive. However, the cars were beautiful. Preston visits the dealership fairly often so he knows his way around. One of the Ferrari’s in the shop had Virginia plates of “Player One”. Preston was fairly certain that was “Agent Zero” aka Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards car.

Going back through security in IAD I was behind the legendary basketball coach John Thompson. I am pretty sure he has a lot of replacement parts. He knew as soon as he walked through the X-ray he was destined straight for the extra screening area. It seemed like the wand went off over all of his body. Or he may just have REALLY big replacement hips that cause the wand to permanently hum. Regardless watching this giant man with stretchy elastic waistband pants get wanded made my wait through security much more entertaining.

Since I was technically still on my international trip I was allowed to use the Red Carpet Club one last time. I was really annoyed because this club didn’t have any diet soda in the self-serve cooler. They had random stuff like root beer, Fanta, and Cherry Coke, but nothing diet. Joel and my dentist will be happy to know that I settled for water.

I slept for the entire short flight to Philly. Upon landing I grabbed my checked bag which had clearly taken an earlier flight. My name was not in lights at Hertz, so I had to go inside the Hertz Number One Club Gold office. For some reason the reservation didn’t get processed with my membership number. The guy was pretty efficient and had me on my way within a few minutes.

After stopping to get some pizza at Levita’s I went to Granny and Pop’s house. I had a nice time catching up with them and telling them about my trip. Becky had written to me earlier in the day to see if I wanted to go to movie that night. I didn’t know if I would have the energy but it turned out when the time came I thought it sounded like fun. We saw “I Love You Man”. It was hilarious. I highly recommend it. After the movie I went back to Granny and Pop’s and went straight to bed.

It was another great day.

Katy