I had been officially on leave for one day, but it was just a fairly standard day off that consisted on working on the trip report for our weekend trip in Italy in October, playing a game on my iPad and running some errands. I did spend a little bit of time on holiday related tasks like trying to finalise arrangements with friends, doing the online check for our airline hotel and sorting out our transfer in Los Angeles.
Originally, we thought Graham would still have to work this day and was going to meet me at the airport hotel, but he also ended up being at home. We had a bit of a lie in. Overnight I had a message from one of our friends that we were meeting up with to let me know that they wanted to come to church with me and would collect me from the hotel on Sunday. I also took care of our online check in for our flights. In October Graham had his first experience with travelling with mobile boarding passes and he actually quite liked it. We decided to do it this time, too. We just hit one snag. With British Airways you can only get mobile boarding passes via the app, which is separate from the app for their frequent flyer program that I already have on my phone. Still, it did not take long to download and soon we had our respective boarding passes.
Graham made coffee and I played with my iPad. I got multiple reminders that I should be packing. As Graham had expected to be working that day, he had packed at the beginning of the week. I hate packing with a passion. My sweet spot is starting to pack about an hour before I am due to leave. That was not going to be an option that day. I started to assemble stuff I was going to take. Once everything had been laid out on the bed, the actual packing took about 5 minutes. My hand luggage and personal item were soon ready to go, too. In the end everything had gone so smoothly that I wondered if I had overlooked something vital.
With the packing out of the way, we spent the rest of the morning playing our respective computer games. Around 14:00, I went to do the final rubbish and recycling run. As I came back upstairs, I had a message that our room was ready. There was also a bit of a lull in the bad weather, and we decided to head out.
The trip to the airport was quick and smooth. We did not have long to wait for a tram to the station and our train got there just after we arrived at the platform. It was relatively empty, too. The hotel that we were staying at is pretty much straight across from the station. We did however need to take our lives into our hands to get across the road.
With just over a week to go I found a great airline staff deal at the Doubletree by Hilton at the airport. We had stayed there back in 2021 and it is a nice hotel. I would have preferred the new Holiday Inn, but that was nearly twice the price. In the end this worked out great as this is much closer to terminal 3.
As I had done online check in and picked our room the day before, we did not even have to go to the front desk as the app acted as a digital key. That meant I missed out on the famous warm chocolate chip cookies. However, as Graham can’t have one anyway, I was happy to pass on this. I browsed the internet for a while Graham had a nap.
Around 17:00, we headed down to the bar for an early dinner. Graham had a beer and some fish and chips with mushy peas and curry sauce. I had a gin and tonic and a cheeseburger with fries. It was a great burger, too.
After dinner, we went back to the room. Graham put on the TV, and this was a very powerful reminder why we no longer have a TV license. There was literally nothing worth watching. At around 19:00, we decided to settle down for the night and it did not take long until we were asleep.
Dolphingirl’s Travels 
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