Landed safe and well - met up with Jeannie. All is good - more details later. Plus pictures.

I would have posted this from Houston Airport, if their WiFi network didn’t require you to tell them what state you live in. 

Please, no jokes about the ‘state’ of my life.

I mean, how hard can it be to realise that perhaps, just perhaps, in an international airport you have the slightest chance that one or two of the people who would like to use your network may not actually live in America.  So this post has been posted at the same time as the last post, which is basically as soon as I can get some form of Internet access.  Make sense of that last sentence if you dare.

My fears were well founded, and I did miss my connecting flight – I feel bad because Jeannie is picking me up from the airport, and it means she has had to change her plans at basically the last minute.  For me, it means I have an extra two hours in Huston (which is rather warm, if completely overcast), and I spent much of that time sitting in a sports bar drinking bottled Heineken.

So far everyone has been helpful, friendly and polite, with perhaps the exception of the border control people who just looked really tired, and incredibly fed up.  So they were polite, but you could tell that their heart wasn’t really in it (unlike John, my bartender in the Sky Bar).

Oh yes, I got ‘selected’ again at Huston, so it’s not just the British who think I look a bit dodgy.  The difference with being selected in Houston was that I didn’t spend five minutes with the officer talking about how impossible it is to get a decent cup of tea when abroad.  Instead the Americans made me take my boots off, and ran a metal detector over me, and rooted around in my bag.  I really had to bite my tongue to stop myself from making a joke along the lines of “Take my shoes off?  Don’t you know that my sweaty socks are a chemical weapon” – I thought better of it, being anally examined by these folks is something I didn’t really want to happen.

I guess they are just targeting stunningly good looking men who are travelling on their own.

Still I should be alright after a simple little internal flight…right?

This is probably the fastest post I’ve ever done, it’s definitely the highest, as I am currently cruising 36,000 feet above sea level at a speed of 597 mph.  I know this because I am sitting here watching the little in-flight display that is embedded in the chair in front of me.

While I really don’t like flying (I’m 6’1”, and fly economy, guess why I don’t like flying), and this is the longest I’ve ever flown, it is also one of the more pleasant flights because I am sat at the very back of the plane (so there are no children kicking me in the back),  I also have an aisle seat and there is no-one sitting next to me.  This has given me a fair bit more room than I am accustomed to.

The in-flight display has a little graphic of where the plane is, and I was upset to discover that, even though we are flying over the continent of North America, I still have over five hours of flying before I reach Houston.

Can I just plead ignorance in not knowing that Houston is in Texas, and therefore in the South of America, leaving me flying the length of the country.

I’m ever so slightly worried that I’ll miss my connecting flight – but on the positive side, the weather in Huston might be nice and sunny.  So while I don’t want to get stuck there, it would be nice to work on a bit of a tan.

Rather obviously I can’t post this from the plane itself, but will instead have to wait until I’ve landed and found a hotspot.