California, Day 1

Even as I write this, on the plane, it hasn't quite hit me yet: I'm going to California!

Permit me to explain. After a long and busy year doing an MSc at the University of Warwick, this September has been both a relaxing break, and a frantic rush as I try and cram as much as possible into my five weeks of freedom between handing in my dissertation and starting my PhD at the same institution.

After handing in my dissertation on August 27th, I headed to Edinburgh for a week-long summer school at Heriot-Watt University on theoretical fluid dynamics, which was fascinating and closely related to my research. It was particularly nice to have academics who were not simply evangelising their latest "look at what I can prove" theorem, but instead had come, some from the USA, to teach us.

After that, I spent a quiet week at home in Northern Ireland, before heading to Guildford for a week: this was another summer school, in the more broad vein of analytic methods for PDEs, which was also very interesting, if a little more broad and not quite as relevant to me as the previous one.

Now, however, the focus shifts from maths to relaxation, with a ten-day holiday in California, spending five nights in each of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A good friend of mine, Tim Sullivan, who was a PhD student at Warwick when I was an undergrad there, is now in a postdoctoral research position at the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech, in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. I've always wanted to get out to California and see him, an this is basically my last chance to do so, since his position at Caltech finishes in the spring.

I'm combining a visit to Pasadena and LA with a whistle-stop tour of San Francisco. Serendipitously, my housemate's boyfriend (Robert) lives in San Francisco, and kindly offered his sofa-bed for me to crash on; coincidentally, my visit overlaps with that of Charlie (my housemate).

I'll be blogging about every day as usual. All of California uses Pacific time; except for a couple of weeks (due to non-matching daylight savings dates), this means that California is 8 hours behind the UK. Unless otherwise stated, all times are local.

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My journey started this Saturday morning (17th), having spent just one night in Coventry after getting back from Guildford. Task one: get from Coventry to Heathrow.

In spite of being the world's fourth busiest airport (only Atlanta, Beijing, and Chicago O'Hare handle more passengers), Heathrow's connections to London and, more importantly to the rest of the UK leave something to be desired. Its road connections are actually remarkably good: it has direct access to the M4, into central London and to the west; with the opening of T5 in 2008, a new junction to the M25 was opened, giving easy access to all directions from the capital.

By contrast, in spite of being London's main airport since the 1960s, the Piccadilly line was only extended to Heathrow in 1977, with the Heathrow Express connection to the Great Western Main Line out of Paddington opening only in 1998. As an illustration of how joined-up public transport is at best a side-effect, rather than the focus, of government transport policy, the Heathrow Express would never have been built if it had not been for private finance from BAA, the airport operator.

While bus connections run from Reading and Woking railway stations to Heathrow, many people instead opt to travel to the airport by National Express coach. I, however, decided to go via London and use the Heathrow Express.

0931 Coventry to London Euston, arr 1034 (actual 1041)

I headed to London not 24 hours after doing the opposite journey. For the second time in as many journeys, not everything went perfectly to plan: my journey to Coventry on Friday was delayed by 20 minutes while we waited just south of Queens Park while checks were made of the overhead wires; fortunately the damage was confined to a different line, and we eventually got underway again. 

This morning, there was a broken down train at Berkhamsted. I suspect, however, that it had cleared by the time we were going through, because although we crawled along for a few miles north of Berkhamsted, I could see no trains stopped, and I think by the time we passed through there was merely the tail end of a tailback, so mercifully we arrived into Euston just seven minutes late.

At this point, I had intended to make the short walk to Euston Square and get the Circle line to Paddington. However, I went completely into autopilot and before I'd realised what I'd done I'd touched in my Oyster card and gone through the barriers at Euston underground station. So, plan B: go via Oxford Circus.

Victoria line, Euston to Oxford Circus

Now, regular users of the tube will know that there is cross-platform interchange between the Bakerloo and Victoria lines at Oxford Circus. Unfortunately, the interchange goes in the wrong direction: from the southbound Victoria line I had level access to the southbound Bakerloo line, but I needed the northbound Bakerloo line.

As this is a fairly rare connection and the passageways are relatively narrow, making this particular change requires stairs; there are no escalators. Fortunately I didn't have too big a case, and I didn't have to wait long for the next train:

Bakerloo line, Oxford Circus to Paddington

At Paddington I tried to use the Heathrow Express ticket machine but, undoubtedly to make it simpler for foreigners, the ticket machines do not sell railcard fares, and thus I was forced to queue up at the ticket office. Fortunately there is a dedicated Heathrow Express ticket office and I made the next train with a minute or so to spare.

1110 Heathrow Express, Paddington to Heathrow Central, arr 1125

The Heathrow Express, inaugurated in 1998, branches off the Great Western Main Line twelve miles west of Paddington. With a top speed of 100mph, it whisks you from Paddington to Heathrow Central in just 15 minutes. I say Heathrow Central rather than Heathrow T123 because, well, Terminal 2 is no more: it's being completely rebuilt, and will eventually replace the existing Terminal 1 as well.

I checked in for my United Airlines flight direct to San Francisco, and headed through security. As we were getting a meal on the plane, I decided to not have anything to eat, so I just browsed the shops for an hour or so before heading to Gate 49.

While officially in terminal 1, I think Gate 49 must be part of the new Terminal 2 that will eventually be connected: for one, it is visibly new and spacious, bedecked in wooden panelling, in contrast to the grey plastic and painted metal which are more familiar in Heathrow. More importantly, however, the walk to get from the lounge to gate 49 was seemingly interminable; I cannot recall a longer walk in an airport ever. At least I got there eventually, and boarded my plane:

Flight UA931: 1410 London Heathrow T1 to San Francisco, arr 1714
Operated by United Airlines using a Boeing 777, seat 44B
Pushback: 1430, takeoff 1502, landing 1727, on stand 1732

We boarded in good time and had the doors closed by 2:10pm, our nominal departure time, but unfortunately there were some air traffic control delays and we didn't push back until 2:30.

We then sat in a queue for runway 27R for half an hour, seemingly not moving much, with little visible sign of other planes taking off. Usually, Heathrow's two runways are used one for takeoffs, one for landings. However, prior to our use of 27R for takeoff, I saw at least three planes land, and I didn't notice many take off (though I was reading my book).

Eventually we took off at 3:02pm; just before we did I caught a glimpse of a queue of at least a dozen planes all waiting to take off; I know ATC delays at Heathrow are relatively common but it did seem slightly unusual.

On taking off we undertook a standard "Daventry departure": very shortly after taking off westbound out of Heathrow, over the M25 and Windsor Castle, we turned sharply right and headed north towards Daventry, in Northamptonshire, one of the standard waypoints for departing planes towards the USA.

Thanks to flying great circle routes (because the shortest route between two points on a sphere is usually not a straight line on a flat map), our route to San Francisco took us north, over Nottingham, Carlisle, Stornoway, gradually curving west, skirting over the north-east tip of Iceland, and crossing the centre of Greenland.

From there we crossed the Northwest Territory skirting just north of Hudson Bay, before gradually passing south-west over Canada. Just north-west of Edmonton we turned very slightly south, headed over the Rockies and came down into the US towards the east of Washington and Oregon states, and down into California.

Of course, most of the journey passed unnoticed: the lights were dimmed between the two meal services and, save for a few pockets of turbulence, the cruise was pretty uneventful; I whiled away the time watching Yes, Minister and writing this blog.

We were served two meals on the plane. The first came a couple of hours after takeoff, and was a hot lunch/dinner: there were two options, a vegetarian lasagne, and a roast chicken breast. Being in the second row from the back, however, by the time i was served they had run out of the vegetarian option, so I had the chicken breast.

By this stage it was about 5pm British time (though only 9am in California), and having not eaten since breakfast at 9am I was ravenous. The food was quite nice, especially for airline food; the chicken breast was served with some potato wedges and some broccoli, as well as a some unidentifiable brown sauce, which tasted like gravy but had the consistency of honey.

In addition, there was a bread roll, a "salad" - really a small box of green leaves, with a solitary tomato - of which I ate the tomato, and a dessert; the dessert was a slice of chocolate cake covered in a fruit topping, which was very tasty. A pretty good meal; just a shame there wasn't a little more of it.

The second meal service came about an hour before landing in San Francisco, about 4:30pm Pacific time (about 12:30am British time). It was basically a snack pack, consisting of a small ham and cheese sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a Twix. By this stage my stomach was feeling a bit worse for wear due to the odd timings and quantities of food, so I ate the sandwich but saved the crisps and the chocolate for later.

We approached San Francisco from the north: we got superb views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, and of Oakland before coming down the bay and turning right to head west into the airport. The approach is somewhat nerve-racking: at 800ft we were still over water; at 200ft we could something up ahead, but the land didn't seem to start until about 20ft before the beginning of runway 28R.

We landed after 11 hours and 25 minutes of flying time, travelling about 5400 miles, at 5:27pm local time. We were on stand in just five minutes, and while there was a short wait for immigration it was nothing like as bad as I was expecting, and I only had to wait about ten minutes.

After having done so, I retrieved my bag, which had already made itself to the carousel, it finally hit me: I saw a sign saying "Welcome to the United States".

I headed for the Bay Area Rapid Transit, universally known as BART, for which the station was just a short walk inside the terminal building. I used one machine to change my $20 bill for four $5 bills, before using a ticket machine to give me a ticket to the value of $8.10, for a single to Civic Center/UN Plaza. I made it onto the train just 40 minutes after landing:

BART Yellow Line: 1807 San Francisco International Airport to Civic Center/UN Plaza, 1835

I got the train nine stops to the Civic Center station, from which Robert's apartment is a short five-minute walk. There, we chatted and had some pasta before all heading to bed at about 10pm.  In my case I had been up for 22 hours, and it was already 6am Sunday morning.

I've said it before, and I've said it again: timezones are weird.