At Heathrow

Well the first part of the trip went to plan. The car arrived about five minutes before time, of course we were ready 30 minutes before that!

I'd certainly recommend JC Executive Cars to anyone looking for Airport Transport, a small three car firm the personal contact, regular checks that the trip information is correct and the e-mail contact a day before leaving, were all over and above my expectations.

So we are safely at Heathrow we arrived at 6.50. Checking the bags in went well, I checked in for the flight yesterday over the web, so it was just weighing and handing over the bags. For those interested in such things my bag was 18K and Drew's 23.7K (the limit is 23 each, so between us we were below that).

My bag fitted into the new smaller hand luggage regulations, we had someone in front of us ranting because his bag was to large, by about five inches, after ranting and shouting at the staff he finally conceded and he had to take out the key items he needed and put them in a plastic bag and then check his hand-luggage into the hold. Efficiently BAA offer a facility to do this at the security desk, so at least he didn't need to go back out to the end of the queue.

The new regs about taking belts and shoes off before passing through the metal detector caused the process to be a little longer than it used to be, but mainly because people were having to be told to do it. When people had already taken their shoes off the system worked quite quickly. So 25 minutes after handing our bags over, here we are in the Holideck Lounge, me drinking orange juice and blogging, Drew starting on the free wine. (Well it is 2.30 p.m. in the afternoon in Mumbai, so he is obviously acclimatising himself already.)

The flight takes of at 11.05 so boarding starts at 10.35, plenty of time to make full use of these facilities. I love the quietness of a lounge in a busy airport, it is really relaxing. Time to join Drew in a glass of wine I think.