Going Home!

My flight today was not due to leave until 10:30pm so I took my time checking out at 11am but leaving my bags in a pay locker at the hostel and to a ride in to downtown Manhattan for something to do, I wandered around for a while and then took a different Metro back up to near the Hostel but walked through a part of Central Park as I think this was one of the only places we didn’t see on Jerry’s Tour! Back to the hostel I got my bag and took the Metro and SkyTrain out to JFK airport. I had been told it would take me nearly 3 hours to do the journey but in the end it only took an hour or so. Luckily I was able to check in even though it was only 4pm so with about 6 hours to kill I went over to Terminal 4 – which has the largest selection of restaurants and bars and had a couple of beers and some food there and generally mooched around the shops before returning to T7 to go through security and wait for the flight.
We left about 15 minutes late due to the place being a little late getting in but the flight was fine and I had booked a seat right at the back so it was only a ‘double’ rather than a ‘triple’ and had a but more room to move around. The evening meal was typical ‘plane food’ of chicken and rice and then I tried to sleep the next couple of hours until the rather lame breakfast of a coffee and pastry came round just before we circled over London for about 20 minutes before landing. My bag came off the plane fairly quickly and got out to be met by Phil, Ian and Amy who had driven down to meet me. We took a taxi across to the hotel where they had parked the car and were on the road home to Manchester at 12 noon and did really well to make Leigh to drop others off at 3:30pm, so we missed the ‘Birmingham M6 Rush Hour Carpark’. Calling in at The Barton for at last A REAL PINT (or 2!) of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, it was excellent, however the first defiantly didn’t touch the sides!