Outward bound

We were booked on an early flight out of Heathrow on United Airlines, which meant getting out of bed at 4:30am At least the traffic wasn't too bad at that time! We were ahead of the rush so got our tickets and got checked in fairly quickly and had plenty of time to get breakfast before going through security (where we had our shoes searched, poor bloke looked a little upset at the smell) and into the boarding area. There was some delay because they had to defrost the plane before we could take off, but we left Heathrow only 20 minutes or so late. The in-flight entertainment consisted of a single tape with about eight movies to choose from, though it was slightly frustrating that you therefore had to wait for the longest film to finish before the tape got rewound and you could watch the next one. I watched Bewitched, Must Love Dogs, Bruce Almighty, some of Batman Begins (because that was the longest film, so always the last one showing...) and the end of Bad News Bears. Overall, not a bad selection, I thought, and the meals were reasonably edible.

Upon landing at Washington Dulles we were soon able to locate the bus stop for the car hire and, after the guy behind the counter tried really, really hard to give us an SUV instead of a car (he started off at $47 extra for the week, ended up basically trying to give it us for free), we picked up our Taurus and we were on our way. We nearly ended up back at the airport a couple of times because there were some new roads which weren't in the GPS software, but we were soon cruising along the interstate. One of the nice things about the US is the amount of space - in the UK the countryside always feels a little crowded, the roads are sometimes narrow because there's just no room for them to be any wider and everything is scrunched up close together, the US doesn't have so much of a problem there because there's so much more space to go around.

We arrived at our host's house after a few hours of pleasant driving and had some lunch while taking in the first quarter of the Notre Dame/Syracuse game and then had a trip out to The Mall in Columbia, no shopping at this early stage though, before locating the nearest Wendy's for tea.