Good morning Woodbridge, VA!
It's currently 17 minutes past 7 in the morning, and I'm sat here typing out our first blog post regarding the Invasion of Virginia by the Bassett sixth formers and the Havelock Academy 'lads' as Jo enjoys calling them.
Due to me being utterly shattered last night, I didn't have the energy to get up and write last night, so I guess I'll have to write two for today.
A brief intro then, Mr Ford (Also known as 'Bobby F') asked me to create this as a bit of a log of our activities while here, perhaps something we can show to the lot who come next year. I'm hoping to have most people on the trip write a bit of stuff for this, as listening to it just from my point of view will probably get very boring very quickly.
So! Yesterday we all got to school for 6 AM, excitement kicking the last of our sleep deprivation from our souls, and we clambered onto the bus for a long an uneventful trip to Heathrow airport. Here we found that Allanah and Joey had both neglected to notice the "23" in the weight limit, so when they noticed me weighing my bag and saw that magic number "14", they pounced on me to add some of their stuff into my bag.
Due to my own honesty, I then failed the security question "Has anyone asked you to take anything in your luggage". Woops. After giving half the stuff back, and neglecting to mention the other stuff, we got our bags checked and headed through security, where Bobby F got frisked (we think he enjoyed it) and Chris complained about having to take his shoes off. Other than that, no real problems.
Finally airside, the girls glanced at the duty free shopping and almost exploded with happiness, and so we spent a good hour (after most of us had a large coffee/Hot Chocolate boost from the Starbucks) shopping and talking. Imi managed to spill Vanilla Latte on Hannah's jacket, and then Aishah managed to spill her drink onto Imi's jacket. Karma? I think so.
We marched off to the gate where we were all searched again, and this time Danny Beare had to be frisked too (We think he enjoyed it too), and then sat around for a while waiting for the plane to board. There was an huge amount of waiting yesterday, that much is true.
On the plane, we had a few nervous glances from some people as we took off, me being the typical adrenaline junky and almost giggling I loved it so much, and then we were in the air, where a rather attractive cabin crew lady needed to talk to Mr Ford about the school trip people on the plane. We spent a good half an hour after that saying his eyes kept drifting, but in case his wife reads this, seriously Jen, he was a good boy.
After a further 7 hours and 33 minutes of incredibly boring sitting around, we landed in the United States. After we passed over Maine, the views outside became incredible, I'm including a couple of pictures I took below, but the window scuffed them up slightly which is a shame, New York city from 35 thousand feet is actually rather impressive.
The Hudson River, you can't really see New York in the picture, but if you look to the area just to the left of the river, that's Manhattan.
Snow on the ground in New Jersey.
Islands off the coast of Maine.
Finally we landed and entered Immigration. We spent a good 45 minutes in the line before the announcer informed us that Aishah had the wrong form, so I offered to go with her to find one, and we dodged under barriers and skirted around families until we reached the forms table, where we realised that the form we needed seemed to only come in Chinese, French and what can only be described as Martian.
Eventually, after some searching and a bit of luck we found and English one, filled it out and then annoyed half the queue by pushing our way back to Mr Ford at the front, actually managing to get further ahead in the queue than we were when we left!
Other than that (Ali informed me I had redeemed myself for my check in failure after that) we had no problems, successfully collecting luggage and passing through customs, where Mr Bassett, Mrs Smith, James Durkin, Tommy and a couple of others were waiting for us.
At this point, Kim realised that Virgin had neglected to bring her bag with the plane (which in my opinion displays a rather large lack of judgement), so I guess we didn't get through without a single problem. Hopefully it will arrive today though, Kim said something about it arriving on the next plane.
As Mr Ford, Mr Gibson and Kim walked out from customs, we gave them a rousing cheer for being late.
Finally free of airports for the day, we got out into the open air, which was a lovely change from the stuffy aeroplane and airports, and Rob and Tom celebrated by body flopping into the nearest snow bank.
The bus arrived, and we clambered on, at which point Mr Bassett pulled out Soda and Oreos, gratefully received by all! Traffic was a pain due to it being rush hour, so the journey back to Gar-Field took some time, but we eventually arrived, and met our host families, finally ending our long invasion journey.
Even though most of us were awake for a long time yesterday (I was awake for about 22 hours straight) it didn't stop me waking up at quarter past 4 this morning. Shame really.
It's now... 7:49, and I wish you all a good day. Expect another post tonight.
-Andy Repton,
On behalf of everyone on the Virginia USA 2010 trip.
