24 June – Boston

The trip began this morning with a 4.30am wake-up call and a taxi ride to Birmingham Airport, swiftly followed by a short hop to Dublin. We then had the joy of going through US Immigration Control before boarding the flight to Boston. We also managed to go through security at Dublin unnecessarily, having inadvertently wandered out of the flight side of the airport.
However after countless strip-searches and so many x-rays that we began to emit a faint fluorescent glow in the dark, we finally settled into the centre row of the Boston-bound Airbus. A small man with large territorial ambitions in the row ahead of me immediately reclined his seat as far as it would go and kept it there for the entire flight, meaning that I spent the next 3000 miles with my face pressed against the back of his seat. Who says air travel isn’t glamorous!
We finally arrived in Boston at 1.30pm local time (5 hours behind the UK) and got a taxi to the hotel. Our room was still in the process of being cleaned so Mark (clearly feeling homesick already) helped things along by snatching the Hoover and vacuuming the floor, thus causing much hilarity among the cleaners who queued up to photograph him on their phones. No doubt he will appear as the centrefold of the next edition of “US Janitorial Staff Monthly” – we have already reserved our copy.
During the ride to the hotel, Sheldon (aka Mark) had also become inordinately excited after spotting a branch of “The Cheesecake Factory” within easy walking distance of our hotel. (For those of you nonplussed by the significance of this – check out “The Big Bang Theory”). Inevitably we ended up there eating an unfeasibly enormous meal which appeared to consist of half a cow each. About the only thing we didn’t eat was cheesecake!
It’s now 7.30pm local time which equates to 12.30 in old money. As we’ve been up since 4.30am our first night in the US is about to come to an early close.
Tomorrow we are off the Bangor (and if anyone is tempted to comment on that – just remember it’s me who does the jokes round here!).