Day 1 Home to London Heathrow

  Inverness, Scotland, United Kingdom
Saturday, May 17, 2008

It begins! After running around the house this morning with my "what have we forgotten" head on for a while, come 1230 off we went. Driving through Glen Shiel, Cluanie, Invermoriston and up Loch Ness to Inverness. A route we have done many a year living in this part of Scotland, but not usually so slow! For a rare event I stuck to the speed limit, with petrol (gas!) at £1.18 a litre (about $8.30 a gallon) driving for maximum fuel efficiency is the order of the day. I managed about 50MPG which is about 10 more than normal.
 
The long term car park at Inverness is a lot cheaper than a lot of other airports; we got it for about £3 a day. Our first part of the journey was with Easyjet (or Sleasyjet as they are known) a big low cost carrier in the UK. The low cost carriers are our limitations when it comes to baggage, only 20kg (44 pounds) allowance each, I had weighed our baggage before we left - 15kg each. Room for expansion! Catriona has painted Scotland flags on both of our cases as it makes them much more distinctive on the baggage carousel. The check in girl asked us where we had bought them as she thought they were good. You can never flaunt your Nationality too much :-)
 
Then a quick Starbucks before through Security. I removed everything but my glasses and the flipping thing STILL beeped! Not long to wait, the plane just landed as we got in the lounge. A fairly full plane. Inverness now has an Executive Lounge (read small cubby hole in the corner) which, for the princely sum of £16, you too can get away from the plebs and have some free drink. We didn't bother. We had Millionaire Shortbread (AKA Caramel Shortbread) we had bought in Tescos on the way past!
 
Plane was 10 mins late in taking off, and thus began the Easyjet sales push. Drinks, coffee, snacks, afternoon tea, perfumes, tickets for the Gatwick Express? No, No, and more no. At least they're not as bad as Ryanair.
 
Landing at Gatwick was on time, baggage was there (amazing, but right enough this was not Heathrow) and off we toddled to find the National Express bus to Heathrow. A tip to save money - if you are flying British Airways on the next stage of your journey, show your boarding pass and get £2 off a ticket - every little helps :)
 
The bus duly arrived 15 mins late and off we went up the M23 to the M25. The seats were some kind of plastically leather, not very comfortable and the mandatory seatbelts decided that they would remain slack at all times making them worse than useless. Another annoying thing (also noticed on the Easyjet plane) is the background music (Magic FM as it turned out), if you are going to play music, at least turn it up loud enough so you can hear the flipping thing. It was like sitting beside someone with an IPod playing - you could hear the odd note and hiss but not usually enough to make out what it was.
 
And then we were on the M25. Living up in the sticks we hear about how bad the traffic is in the UK, but luckily don't have to suffer it very often. But boy we did make up for this tonight. Junction 10-12 was crawling. We played our usual motorway game of Eddie Spotting (a transport company here in the UK who don't know). I won 3 points to 2 :)

1hr 30 mins later our scheduled 45 minutes journey ended at the Central Bus station at Heathrow. Unfortunately T4 is where we needed to go, so transfer to another bus (the 555). In retrospect we would have been quicker getting the underground from T1 to T4, as the traffic round Heathrow was also abysmal, There was obviously something going on as there was a lot of police, flashing lights and diversions going on. I'm sure if it's serious we will read about it in the news!
 
8 hours after leaving home, we arrived at our first overnight stop, The Yotel in T4. We have previously stayed at the one in Gatwick so knew what to expect.

Yotel bed

The Yotel is like a Japanese Pod hotel, a small compartment a bit bigger than a railway sleeper. For one person it's more than adequate. For two it's "cozy"! It has a 1m x 2m bed, with multi channel TV/radio/movies, Internet (though no wireless at the T4 one) and a shower/toilet. £59 compared to other hotels round Heathrow (plus another £10 for the Hoppa busses) it's great value plus you are already in the terminal.

Yotel shower

 

Next was food time. Wetherspoons pubs are always good value and at the airports they are the best place to eat, T4's was just outside the Yotel so even better. A plate of Nachos and a Fish Pie with rather undercooked carrots was washed down with a pint. We checked out where to pick up the bust to T5 in the morning and retired for the night at 11pm.