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Friday - Travelling through Heathrow T5 is usually such a straightforward and pleasant experience (in so much as airport transit can ever be a pleasant experience), but on this day it turned out to be a bit of a palaver.
Our gate was called in terminal 5B, which meant getting the little train thing from terminal 5A. Given that the train only goes about four hundred yards, I don’t understand why there isn’t some sort of walkway. I always seem to spend way longer waiting for the train than it would take to just walk to the other terminal. Anyway, we got the little train to terminal 5B and went to our gate.
When we arrived at our gate, I looked at the 150-or-so people waiting to board the plane and I looked out of the window at the enormous 747 parked at our gate and thought I was about to be treated to my first practically deserted flight in ages. We walked down the gangway towards the plane, then at the last minute, got diverted down some stairs and onto the tarmac, where a bus was waiting for us (and where I took this photo of our not-to-be-plane while we were waiting for the bus to leave).
Once the bus was full, we went on a ten minute tour of the airport until we ended up in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, next to a much smaller plane. Doh!
On the plus side, the much smaller plane was a new 787 Dreamliner, which was really, really nice. Lots of space (helped by the fact that we were flying Premium Economy on this occasion), big windows (that dimmed at the touch of a button - no blinds here) and an excellent infotainment system (although the map view was disappointingly disabled for much of the journey, so we couldn’t monitor our progress).
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