Day 41 - Wednesday 5th September

Starting from September, Amelia now goes to Clowns Nursery in the morning on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So today Suzy drove her there, allowing Nicky to look after Alexis.

I finished packing ready to fly out of London this afternoon. The driver was due to pick me up at 10am and as usual he was 10 minutes early.

For about half an hour, progress was slow because the traffic was hardly moving. The driver tried taking back streets but the traffic was still jammed when he got back onto the main route.

Originally I had told him that I had plenty of time but by now I was starting to get worried. I suggested to him that we tried a different route to the airport. Eventually he decided to go via the M25 which he said was about double the mileage.

All roads leading onto the A40 were now at a stand still for as far as the eye could see. After 5 or 10 minutes heading back in the other direction, we were out of the traffic and moving again.

He then received a mobile phone call from another driver saying that the traffic bankup went all the way to Hanger Lane and so we could have been stuck for hours and I would have missed my flight. As it turned out, we reached Heathrow Terminal 5 at about 11:30 which was plenty of time.

After checking in, I went to the BA lounge. I arrived at noon just in time because they had taken away the breakfast food and were putting out the lunch food. I had a couple of glasses of red to calm my nerves after the traffic problems.

When I checked in, no gate had been allocated for my flight. At 12:30, the board showed the gate number and then at about 12:45 it said "flight closing".

When I got to the gate, I was told that, although the departure time was 1:30, this is just the time that the plane pulls back from the terminal and before that they need to transport passengers by bus out to where the plane is waiting on the tarmac.

The bus trip took about 5 minutes and we had to climb stairs to get onto the plane. It left on time.

They served "dinner" at about 3pm London time (just 3 hours after my lunch) and they turned out the cabin lights at about 5pm for our overnight sleep.