Summary
Flew British Airways overnight to London then Milan. Nice individual cubbies in Business Class with lay-flat seats. Sadly, the food was dreck.
Details
Today we fly out of Austin at 5:55 pm. It’s Easter Sunday which either means there’s fewer rides available to the airport or there’s less traffic than usual. We’ll see which it is. With the partial government shutdown friends have been saying we should get to the airport up to five hours in advance. Wha?? Thankfully the TSA workers are finally getting back pay, even though the bigger shutdown continues.
We’ve been watching for other notices about our flights and destinations. The only pertinent one so far is about a jet fuel shortage caused by the Iran war and the takeover of the Hormuz Strait. Air traffic in Milan’s being affected. Emergency air traffic and long haul flights are exempt, which means we’ll be OK.
In a recent business newspaper that shows up in our mailbox there was a story about electric air taxis. Apparently they’re coming to Austin. For us, for today, we’re just taking a regular style Uber. We get to the airport quickly, arriving about three hours before our scheduled departure.
We get our bags checked in no time and are through security about ten minutes later. Not bad! Maybe people don’t like to travel on Easter. Each of us has a carry-on bag flagged for extra inspection. For me it was our picnic kit. They are concerned by a metal knife, understandably. Luckily it is a short, blunt cheese spreading knife. Hey, we’re going to France, the land of cheese, we have to have a knife, no? Upon inspection they say it is cool and let it through.
In Karen’s luggage they are worried about big bags of white powder. Cocaine? No, more like protein powder and creatine powder. They check that it isn’t an explosive and let her through.
We appreciate that we have a lounge where we can hang out til our flight. On the TV the NCAA Woman’s Basketball Championship game is being shown. Our team, the University of Texas Women’s basketball team, was in the final four, sadly they didn’t make it through to the finals so we’re watching UCLA give South Carolina a good thumping, having almost twice as many points. I check and the team average height is a mere 6’ 1”. But they have some much taller outliers.
We’re headed to Heathrow, as our first stop, and it’ll be a nine plus hour flight. Being in the air that long, hopefully we can get some sleep. From Heathrow we’ll continue on to our first real destination: Milan.
The weather in Milan looks great, sunny with highs in the mid 70s and lows in the mid 50s. That’s 10+ degrees warmer than normal, but we’ll take it. We missed fashion week there, which brings mixed emotions.
Our plane is a big one, an Airbus A350. It always boggles the imagination that something that big can get into the air, let alone fly all the way to London.
We depart on time and soon we’re being plied with alcoholic beverage and after that dinner. We have high hopes for the food. But we’re on British Airways, so if you combine the perennial joke about British cuisine not being the greatest and airplane food not being so good, you have my dinner. Inedible. Maybe I just ordered the wrong thing? No, Karen shares some of hers with me and it is also not great. Ah, well, maybe we will have some good food in Italy or France.
OK, time to sleep, or at least to try.
Photos
