Arrival

Well, we got here! Safely and soundly.

Booking in on line and printing the passes was excellent. I even chose our seats. Got to Heathrow and checking in using the bag drop was easy. As usual there was the hanging about, 3 hours. The take off was late 'cos of a rain storm but there we are.

The flight was very pleasant. Although 9 hours long it wasn't too bad. BA seems to have bucked their ideas up quite a bit. Free alcoholic drinks on their flights, unlike American Airlines or United! The in-flight stuff was okay. I spent quite a lot time reading a Monsieur Pamplemosse by Micheal Bond, he of Paddington Bear fame, very entertaining. Gorden Kaye ('Allo 'Allo) would be excellent in the role.

We were apprehensive about arriving at Denver after experiencing Immigration at LA, SF and Salt Lake. They couldn't have been more different; friendly, helpful and pleasant. There were helpers checking that the green forms were filled in correctly and gently directing people to the desks. The other airports could take a lead from this on.

Picked the car up and couldn't work out where the hand brake was! It wasn't so much a hand brake but a foot operated hand brake - don't ask! It's a 4l(!) Chrysler(?) Pacifica 4WD. Very spacious and so light on the steering. However there seemed to be more controls on the steering wheel, dashboard and surroundings than a space shuttle. By now it was getting dark and there were distant rain clouds.

The satnav came into it's own here. It neatly directed us to the interstate, however, no voice! I'd been driving ten minutes when we hit the first rain. Now, it's dark, unfamiliar and raining; this is not good. So I just took it steady and we skirted around the bottom of Denver and just followed I70. We kept hitting some bad patches of rain and it was just like being back home except warmer. We went through the Eisenhower Memorial tunnel which goes straight through the Rockies and, I am reliably informed, has two huge concrete doors that can come down and block the tunnel. The idea was to stop any invading force from the west being able to use it.

Nothing exciting happened except that on the other carriageway about five miles from out hotel there had been an accident and the traffic was stacked back for at least three miles.

Just as we got close to the city of Dillon the satnav crashed! So we had to pull off and find a place to stop and reset it. In doing this we did tale the wrong turning off and after resetting it we found we were about 5 miles from our hotel. Off we went back up onto the I70 and came off at the correct juction this time and promptly misread the instruction on the screen and took a left instead of a right. After checking our position again(!) we drove back up to the lioghts where we had gone wrong and sure enough there was the Best Western. By now it was 10:50 and we had been on the go for 20 hours and it's time for sleep.