OK, I’ve arrived in NY. Man, what a journey. After having a slight faff concerning tickets on Friday– I had a choice between an expensive ticket on a major airline with only one change that took 9 hours roundtrip and a slightly cheaper ticket on an airline I’d never heard of that had 3 plane changes, a 3 hour layover in Chicago, took over 20 hours travel time roundtrip and meant that I couldn’t even get back to my family until Tuesday because I’d be landing so late in Minneapolis that I’d have to stay over night… Anglia wanted to go for the cheap option. I thought that would be fine until I found out I couldn’t even get home until Tuesday. And thought ‘Over 20 hours traveling over 3 days on a shitty airline for 4 hours of voice over?’ I ended up getting the more expensive ticket and the travel agent pulled some strings and had me upgraded to first class. So I was happy.

So today I got up (tired cos Mo has had terrible jetlag since we got here and has been getting up at 4 am…), went out for breakfast with Mo, my sister Sari, my niece Silver and my dad (I had raspberry pancakes. Yum), my mom came and collected me and drove me to the airport. I went through the unbelievably strict security (there will certainly be no terrorist acts on a plane from Duluth, MN, I can tell you), got on the plane and flew to Minneapolis with no problems.

Take-off on the NY flight had been delayed by 20 minutes, so I had enough time to go to Starbucks to get a muffin and a coffee (seemingly airlines no longer provide food on internal flights… why aren’t the tickets slightly cheaper then?). I got on the plane, got out my copy of ‘Dude, Where’s my Country’ whilst sitting in first class only to be told that take-off was delayed by another hour as there was an almighty storm in NYC with snow and freezing rain (NYC is going to get 2 inches of rain tonight that will turn into snow… and, of course, one inch of rain is equal to approx 10 inches of snow… Let’s hope the temp stays up)….

So, we ended up leaving almost 2 hours late. The flight went fine. I finished my book (get it) and had a little sleep. zzzzzzzz

Suddenly I was awoken by one of those ‘weird sounds’ you always hear when you’re flying. It’s a sound that just doesn’t sound right at all, but you sit there trying to act all calm and cool like there’s nothing wrong at all cos you’re such an experienced flier that you’ve heard it all before (I’ve got 3 passports full of stamps and I *still* don’t like the sounds planes make). We were told we would be landing in half an hour…

That half an hour lasted for ages. We were flying in through the clouds in the middle of a storm. It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride. But we landed. The runways were like lakes.

I got into the terminal at La Guardia and the whole place was packed with people who’ve been delayed for most of the day, lying all over the floors, some crowding around TV watching CNN reports on the capture of Saddam.

I got in a cab… another journey that wasn’t exactly smooth… and ended up at my hotel, The Gramercy Park Hotel… it’s quite nice and was definitely grand at one point, it’s all old wood and chandeliers… though my first thought when I walked into my room…

…was “This is the kind of place that middle aged, middle class, married NY men come to commit suicide.”

6 days.