After making final preparations on Friday, there was not a great deal of time remaining for sleep before I boarded the 6:06AM train from Worcester to London. It was a fresh and bright morning in the west midlands, a pleasant change from the recent humidity and thunder storms. The train was pretty quiet at that time on a Saturday morning, and I made it into London on time.
Even with everything running like clockwork, it was going to be pretty tight to get from Paddington to Gatwick and check in before departure. I had some great assistance on this leg of the journey and hats off to London Underground staff who yet again proved their weight in gold. Same cannot be said for ground staff at Gatwick, it seems they were having a bad hair day. And we wasted 20 minutes hanging around at the wrong gate in spite of my protestations that we should double check the gate number. It had been changed. Nevertheless I boarded on time and we were in the air by quarter to eleven.
The flight from London to Charlotte was pretty uneventful apart from a child who appeared to have some kind of behavioural challenges and insisted on screaming at the top of his lungs every few minutes for most for the flight. So I slept in brief snatches.
Since leaving the UK, During the flight I made first use of Pocket Hal to start my travel expenses spreadsheet using Excel Mobile. More about Pocket Hal as the week goes on. While this is a pretty simple spreadsheet the the only calculations being currency conversions and totting up each day’s expenses etc, this clearly demonstrates a practical and professional application of the product. I did not have to drag out the laptop and wait for it to boot. And using my HTC Universal, a device the size of a calculator, I was able to efficiently and accurately record expense information in a form which will be straight forward for our accounts department to process.
I am now on the ground in Charlotte waiting for my connecting flight to Jacksonville. Look forward to connecting with people from Dolphin US, and catching up with some old ACB friends.
For an international airport Charlotte seems pretty limited, no where to exchange currency, and no WiFi that I have been able to detect. So I have fallen back on GPRS. Buts it is all worth it as the girl who assisted me with the baggage reclaim was lovely!
More later.
Pip pip.