So phew, a retirement long-haul travel blog and here we are in Denver and hopefully writing the first retirement travel blog of this trip. Hopefully the first of many but so far it’s not been straightforward. The immediate problem, apart from the fact that it’s twenty past two in the morning, is that my electrical adapter is the wrong configuration. I thought I had brought the right one but, now I’m here and, after checking all the plug sockets in our room, I find I haven’t. If I can’t get the right one there won’t be any blogging.*
So I’m writing this on Saturday after yesterday as a day of travel. Starting out in Leeds at 7 o’clock (a friend takes us to the station, the one I’ve not liked much in recent past but I certainly like him now) it was first class all the way to Denver. Well actually that’s not quite true despite what our various tickets say. I don’t want to come across as a complainer but…
The train journey from Leeds to London says first class but this has long since ceased to mean anything in reality. The free breakfast is a small, uninteresting choc au pain for me and a bacon roll for Mrs Summerhouse. Gone are the days of a proper breakfast. It’s the new Azuma train and it’s definitely smaller and more cramped than the previous model. A sign of things to come on the trip?
We get out at Kings Cross and get into a taxi to take us to Paddington and the Heathrow Express. The taxi gets stuck in a traffic jam. Never mind we’ve plenty of time. We get to Paddington I tip the driver heavily, I’m not sure why probably just practising for the American experience.
We catch a crowded train to Heathrow and then walk to Denver, no I’m kidding, but it’s a long way to check in which we’ve already done on line but we do it again. I then have trouble getting through security because, whilst I took my laptop out of its case, as requested, I laid the case on top of the laptop in the tray and hence the machine ‘thought’ it was still in the case and hence I had to go to the naughty corner while the lady inspected it and I got frisked. It all took an awful long time. Welcome back to the joys of the flying experience.
But time was the one thing we had plenty of. Having eventually found the Club class lounge and that wasn’t easy, we sat in this crowded space (we struggled to get two seats) for about three hours. There was absolutely nothing first class about the experience. Hey ho.
And if we thought that was bad this was nothing to what we found when we got on the plane and into our business class / club class section. The layout of the cabin was absolutely nothing like the one presented on the website. The one I had spent so much time in the preceding week making sure we got seats together without the annoyance of having to pay for it. A complete waste of my time and effort.
On the website the layout was 1 – 2 – 1, i.e. spacious. This real-life layout had a 2-1-2-1-2 configuration, i.e. not spacious at all. Does that sound cramped, well it was. Does it sound difficult to get to the toilet in the middle of the night? Well, it was. Does it sound like business class? Well it wasn’t. When I mentioned this inconvenience to the stewardess, she said, without irony, yes, they’re not good, that’s why we’re getting rid of them, the planes I assume.
God knows what it was like in economy if this was the space and experience (over-micro-waved food) in business class. Our experience improved somewhat when we discovered by pressing all the buttons on view, that the seats did lie completely flat and so we got some sleep eventually, but was it worth the money, nope.
And so, 10 hours later and nearly two hours late we landed in Denver. And then the usual disembarking procedures. Tedious but enlivened by the usually strict-faced immigration man who asked us if we were on honeymoon. Nice touch. Mrs Summerhouse took this as her cue to explain in detail that it was in fact our 50th wedding anniversary. Not right now, but in August. OK, that’s enough information, let’s get to our hotel. But not before the lottery of the baggage claim.
We had intended to take the train at a cost of $10 each but we were too tired to search it out and ended up taking a taxi at the cost of $80 plus $20 tip. Welcome to America, the land of the enormous tip. 20 to 25% being normal these days our taxi driver explained. Bloody hell, where’s that mortgage application?
Retirement long-haul travel
And I’ll leave it there for now, otherwise I won’t be putting out a blog this Tuesday, having missed Friday and even Sunday. First class, well I dread to think what second-class would have been like. Anyway here we are at our rather nice looking hotel (see photo above). Just time for a quick beer in the bar. A beer (about a half pint size)and a glass wine and tip of course even though we’re sitting at the bar (where one did not have to tip when we were last here but then that’s twelve years ago, it seems much has change), for the price of two bottles of wine in Woodies. This could be an expensive fortnight. I’ll try and bring you up to speed with the next part of the trip on Friday, but no promises.
*Eventually bought 2 travel adapters from Wallgreens (sic) at 8 o’clock in the morning, driven there by Michael, the hotel’s hospitality guy. Nice man. I tipped him $20 on top of $57.20 for the adapters. Stop it now with the money, it you’d bought the right adapter none of this would be happening.