Any time you travel across the Atlantic, you get what the Pevensie children in the Narnia books called, “the usual muddle with time.” Perhaps it’s not quite as dramatic as years passing in the blink of an eye, but I definitely struggled to remember what day of the week it was today.
The travel was fairly uneventful. My good wife dropped me off at the South Bend airport about noon yesterday (at least I think it was a day ago??). A few of us in the TSA Pre line grumbled a little because it took us ten minutes to get through security, rather than the normal 3 minutes. But everything else went fine. I had several hours’ layover in Atlanta, but then met the other three in my party and boarded at about 9:30pm.
I don’t have much else to talk about yet, so I’ll give a short speech about my philosophy of transatlantic travel. I think it’s best to leave as late as possible from the US. That gets your body thinking that it’s close to bedtime at least, and you have a shot for a couple of hours of sleep on the plane overnight. And by the time you get to the UK — in our case, 11:30 AM local time, 6:30 AM East Coast time, your body might think it’s about time to get up, even though you slept horribly.
Because most of my flights out of South Bend are on Delta, and because Delta rolled over frequent flier miles during the pandemic, I have this fancy platinum medallion status. I had hoped that might bump me up to the lovely flat bed seats in first class. But alas, I only made it to Comfort +. There doesn’t appear to be much significance to that for an international flight. Maybe there is an extra inch or two of legroom, but I still tossed and turned all night.
The new immigration and customs procedure is interesting. You don’t ever talk to a human being. You walk up to a kiosk and scan your passport photo, and then look into a camera. Evidently it liked what it saw, because the gate opened up and let me walk through. Then the customs “nothing to declare” line was literally walking around a corner and out the door. I was kind of surprised, but someone else in our party surmised that it just goes to show you that they already know everything about us, so they don’t need to ask anymore.
We got on a bus — or rather, two busses. The first attempt was the wrong bus, after the (mostly) friendly bus driver had already taken our luggage and stowed it. He went out to fetch it and sent us back to another bus. I got nervous that we missed our stop in Oxford, because we went on the ring road instead of straight into city center via Cowley Road like I’ve always come into Oxford. But we made it. Hiked a half a mile to Christ Church where we have rooms, and then hiked a mile to the physics building where we met Ard Louis for a podcast interview.
If I weren’t so jet lagged, I’d tell you about that conversation and the building he works in. Instead, listen to the podcast episode when it comes out in a couple of weeks. It’s 8:30pm here, and I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. I promise these posts will get more interesting!
Glad you made it safely on the first leg of your travels!