Day 1 – New Orleans (eventually)

The day began at 6.30 am yesterday in Manchester, with the usual farmyard noises emanating from the bathroom as Mark performed his morning ablutions. After a decent interval we took the shuttle to the airport and went through the joys of checking in.  It seems to be my turn this year to attract the attention of the authorities and got to watch as my backpack was swabbed for drugs, explosives or, for all I know, illicit meat products. The flight was only about half full but still managed to be late taking off.

We were then able to settle down to a choice of the finest cuisine that American Airlines could offer, the effects of which were mitigated to a great extent by the copious quantities of complimentary red wine on offer. We received some helpful travel advice from the stewardess which boiled down to – you meet a nicer class of drunks on Frenchman St. in New Orleans and Atlanta Georgia should be avoided at all costs (despite it being her home town).

The first leg of the flight passed reasonably uneventfully and after seven and a half hours of the joys of hurtling through the air in a metal cylinder we arrived in Philadelphia with a wait of four hours before our onward connection to NO. This was mitigated by our delight in finding that the President had turned up in person to greet us. 

Apparently he tries to personally meet as many incoming flights as possible to ensure that there are no Mexicans on them. Fortunately he gave us the thumbs up!

With 4 hours to kill, unusually for us we decided to pass the time partaking of some food and drink. We found a branch of Legal Seafoods which offered a very agreeable Portuguese seafood stew – although the principal ingredient was listed a “scrod”, something that alarmingly comes next to “scrotum” on the Google search list but actually turned out to be a generic term for white fish fillets! At the end of the meal we were pleased to see that the drinks component of the bill exceeded the food by a comfortable 50% (anyone spot a developing theme here yet?). 

Our onward flight was delayed by about an hour but, possibly as a consequence of the pre-flight imbibing, I slept through most of it, waking just in time to see us fly through a spectacular thunderstorm with lightning and rollercoaster style turbulence! That however paled into insignificance compared to the taxi ride from the airport, with our driver changing lanes apparently at random while scribbling on a notepad he had placed on the steering wheel. Somewhat to our surprise we eventually arrived safely at the hotel. The sights on the drive reminded me of one of the things I find most fascinating about America – it manages  to look both very familiar yet at times utterly alien. 

We were so tired by the time we got to the hotel we just checked in and slumped into bed. When I opened my suitcase I found a nice note from the Transportation Security Agency telling me that my bag had been searched and repacked somewhere in transit. They actually did a better job of packing it than I’d done originally so I suppose I can’t complain.