Day 7-
Today we fly out to London before heading home. Our plan is to take Emirates to Heathrow, before spending the night and continuing the next day with LHR-LAX on American to enjoy business class.
We woke up around 7am, finished packing, and went for breakfast in the lounge. Breakfast was the same as it has been, and while it is plenty sufficient and higher end, I am immensely tired of hotel breakfasts! Most of the time now I'm just ready for lunch foods due to the larger variety of options.
After breakfast in the lounge, we got our belongings and took a taxi to the airport. Hunter and I have both been impressed with the options of taxis in Dubai and how they are often much cheaper than Uber or Careem (local Uber app). It's also cheaper to hail one off the street than to book on the apps. A short 20 minute ride and we were at the airport. What would have been a $75 ride in NYC was under $20 here. We checked in with the Emirates desk, who didn't like our heavy luggage as apparently we are only supposed to have 10 kg (22lbs) of additional weight total (both carry ons). The lady ended up shrugging and said "we can try" and we were both confused as to who was going to be further checking the weight of our luggage, but went with it. If we did have to check our bags, it wasn't a big deal since we were entering London anyways and spending the night, we just prefer not to wait for luggage in the airport.
We easily passed through security and went to one of 3 lounges available in the terminal. It was a small lounge, but had plenty of drinks available which is what we wanted the most. We only stayed for about 45 minutes and then went to the gate to board our flight. We were in the last row of middle seats, which honestly isn't bad on the A380s as the seats are overall larger. The flight time was scheduled for 8 hrs but only took about 7:30 BC we had favorable winds and passed quickly. We were fed twice on the flight, one lunch meal and an arrival snack. Hunter had the beef option and I had the chicken for lunch. It was pretty delicious. The arrival snack was cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, which I am definitely not a fan of, hunter however seems to have no problem with them. It also came with a scone, which I gladly ate.
Cakes in the lounge
boarding the plane
Enjoying the nose camera on the A380
Ontop of the world
Lunch
The stairs up to the top deck
Cucumber sandwiches
Plastic cup of water
Arrival into LHR
Before we knew it, we were in London. It was definitely way too easy to clear into London as we expected to have to do something different than normal due to Covid, but everything went smoothly since Hunter had filled out all our pre arrival paperwork online we were able to use the automatic passport control gates like normal. We took public transit to our hotel, which is no longer free due to Covid like most things, and checked into our runway view suite. Hunter booked this hotel specifically for the runways view rooms. He's always wanted to stay here, but we never did because we would stay in the Holidays Inn Express T4, but it was closed this time along with all of T4. While domestic travel in the US has almost fully recovered Europe is still very much slowed down, with much fewer flights. We were planning on going to Franco Manca for dinner, but that would have required us to take an expensive taxi or 45 minutes on public transit each way. We decided to first see what the executive lounge was offering before making the trek, and low and behold they were serving a full meal of Cajun chicken burgers and sides. We were both impressed and particularly enjoyed their salmon dish and the bottomless diet Pepsi in incredibly crisp glass bottles.
After our lovely hotel dinner, we went to the room where we took our Covid tests required to return to the USA and showered. The tests were very simple and we both had our negative results ready to go in under a half hour.l Hunter spent a lot of time watching planes from the bedroom window and excitedly telling me what they were and where they were going, while I got our clothes out for tomorrow and packed up our dirty clothes. It didn't take long for us to fall asleep with alarms set for breakfast and returning to the airport in the morning.
Day 8 -
We woke up and had a simple breakfast in the hotel lounge. We got back on the bus to the airport and checked in with our lovely American friends who totally get us! The agent even commended us on the AACT listing to save on the taxes. When you're transferring through London, you avoid the $300 taxes that occur when originating from London. That combined with Americans large hub here has made LHR the return point for many of our adventures. In fact the last trip we took before Covid also ended with us transferring to a LHR-LAX flight with American, although that was quite a story! (https://the-traveler-adventures.blogspot.com/2021/05/heading-home.html)
sunrise from the lounge at the hotel
Thanks for the stay Renaissance!
After checking in, we cleared fast track security because we were listed for business, and went to check out the lounge. Unfortunately, they stopped letting in priority pass walk-ups, so we just waited in the general area, thankfully it was only about an hour and a half before departure, so we didn't have to wait a long time. We charged up our electronics and enjoyed the reasonably priced diet cokes that they get to have from airport convenience stores in Europe. Hunter paid about $1.75 each when they can be $3-4 in US airports.
When we got to the gate, we checked in with the agents telling them we were here and we wanted F/J only (first or business class), because we would take a different flight back to the US if we didn't make it in a lie flat seat. If we didn't make it, we would be going to try the Seattle flight. Thankfully we were cleared into business and when we got on, the guy beside Hunter offered to switch so we could sit beside each other. The massive GE90s make the whole plane shake on take off and it wasn't long before we were climbing over the clouds on our way home. It was 11:14 to LAX on our 777-300ER one of Hunter's absolute favorite planes. We were so lucky!
Once we settled into our seats, the purser came around asking everyone for their meal choices. Hunter and I both picked the salmon with truffle hollandaise which was delicious. I also gave the crew a bunch of chocolates to say thanks for taking care of us, and they were so happy! The purser (head flight attendant) even stopped by to thank me personally.
We were quickly airborne and on our way to LAX. We had a few bumps as we flew over Ireland, so service was slightly delayed, but other than that, the flight was smooth and we were excited to have made the flight back to the US and extra excited to be landing on the west coast. If you fly LHR-JFK-SFO for example, the first leg is only slightly longer than the second so it's really nice to be able to make these direct flights over the arctic and end up a lot closer to home when we land. Before Covid PHX DEN and SLC all had LHR flights as well as SGU having an LAX flight but now LAX is the closest we can get to home direct from London on a US carrier and we will still need to take a couple more flights to get back. We are both so grateful to be flying around the world again though that we don't mind one bit.
In LAX we were in a hurry to make our connection and I accidentally left my new wireless headphones on the airplane. Luckily, however, Hunter was actually able to make a few calls and amazingly someone found them and brought them off the plane to us. We are so lucky! At this point, we started looking at flights back to SGU but only PHX was open so we started looking at flights there. Unfortunately, both the SkyWest flights to PHX were delayed to the point we might not even make our connection and would then be stuck in PHX. Instead of being stuck and getting a hotel somewhere, we decided In N Out sounded delicious and a straight 7 hour drive back to Utah sounded like a lot less stress. Hunter booked a rental car, we got some food, and hit the road. I ended up sleeping most of the drive while Hunter was driving so we didn't get any pictures, but as the sun set we got to enjoy a lot of beautiful sunset desert scenery as the perfect end to our amazing trip.
