Sunday 16th - The Flight AA109

Check in was fairly uneventful, although Minty had to re-enter all of her details into the self service machines (which she had already done on-line so was not best impressed with having to do it all again) and also go through a TSA check with being questioned by the ground crew! Unfortunately, mentioning the special occasion for our holiday did not get us any upgrade :-(

We had time to wander through some of the shops, where we secured a Marshall style Bluetooth speaker so we could listen to music in the hotel, as our previous speaker had died just before the holiday. Much cheaper on duty free!!

At the gate, there was some complimentary reading material......papers and magazines. The Beeb found his calling!

Boarding was simple and very organised. People seemed to respect the Group boarding - we were Group 6. Our seats were Mid plane, row 40G and 40H.

Due to a passenger taking ill, just as we were taxi-ing to the runway, our flight AA109 had to turn around and crawl back to the gate so the poorly person could be taken off. An inconvenience, but much better that it happened before we took off as if we had to divert the delay would have been longer.

So, 2 hours later than planned departure at 11.30am, we finally had wheels up. Our route took us over the North West of England and up almost to Glasgow before we made a left turn and headed out to the North Atlantic, over Greenland and then most of Canada before turning South, heading down towards LA. We had interior seats so had no view of the journey.

We got fed twice - the main meal being about an hour after take off. With the 2 hour delay we were ready for our main inflight meal when it arrived. We had ordered Vegan for The Beeb as there had not been any option for vegetarian in the choices on the American Airlines website believe it or not. Whilst this meant he did not get any meat, it also had the unintended consequence of no butter or dairy things either!!!

On the whole the journey was OK except for a woman moving from her seat to the empty one in front of Minty. Said woman promptly hit recline and that couple of inches of reduced space made quite a difference. Minty did insist that the woman move her seat back to the upright position during  the meal, which she did albeit a bit grudgingly. Whenever we needed to get out of our seats we had no choice but to disturb her as there no room to manoeuvre without pushing against her reclined seat. I did point this out to her and she left us little space but although obviously irritated, the selfish cow kept her seat in full recline. Grrrr.

Minty's note to herself.... avoid aisle seats. Whilst it may be good to be able to get up without disturbing others in the same row as you, this does not outweigh the bumps and knocks from the "not so small" cabin crew as they trundle through the plane.

The Beeb had the pleasure of two young Jacob Rees Mogg type boarding school children sitting beside him - a brother and sister. Their nanny was in the seat in the next aisle and hardly spoke to them, while their parents were living it up in first/business class and showed their faces only twice in the whole 10.5 hour flight. During the flight, there was a mishap with a bottle of sparkling water which the little girl fired out over The Beeb, but other than that both kids were very well behaved. By the end of the flight The Beeb felt sorry for them and struck up a conversation and had them laughing at him. We were quite impressed with them in the end up - a 10 and a half hour flight and they did not squabble at all!

Touch down was smooth and it was welcome to LA.