The Journey Home

After driving a total of 2375 miles in our hired car (spent £280 (approx. $530) on petrol), we drove up to Manchester. On the last night of our trip, we stayed in a TravelLodge (a motel) near Manchester Airport, where our sleep was broken by being awoken in the early hours of the morning by the fire alarm. We, and all the other residents had to stand around in the car park waiting for the fire brigade to give the all clear before we could go back to bed. It turned out that someone had fallen asleep after having lit a candle. As far as I know, nobody was hurt.

(Source)

The real trawl was, however, the journey itself. The previous Thursday, the security level at UK Airports was increased to "critical" and pandemonium ensued. Even though by the time that we were travelling the security level had been brought down a step to "severe", the journey was still difficult.

We got to the airport at about 8am, but the queues were such that we didn't get through checking in our luggage and security until 10:30, so went straight to our gate. Boarding was slow as they were seating a few rows at a time and separating men from women so that almost every passenger could be frisked and hand luggage searched before we could get on the plane. They were so strict that they even confiscated Lauren's ball-point pen. As none of the passengers had pens, the flight attendants had to then hand out complementary pens (of which, there were not enough to go around) so that we could fill in the necessary forms for entry to the US.

The plane then couldn't take off until a full manifest listing all passengers had been approved by US Homeland Security. In the end, the plane left about 3 hours late.

Once in the US, there were more body searches and my hand luggage was thoroughly searched. Next, all flights from the UK had to go through customs. One couldn't just walk through the "nothing to declare" bit. About every other person was having suitcases opened up, but thankfully they just asked us a few questions and let us through.

We missed our flight from Philadelphia to Raleigh by about 4 hours, but they put us on a later flight that got into Raleigh at 10pm (3am in the UK). Unfortunately only one of our seven cases made it to Raleigh with us, which meant spending an hour or so standing in a queue to report the missing bags before we could get the taxi home. Thankfully, however, the missing bags arrived at our door the next day (two of which had been opened and searched at some point in the journey).

All in all, though, compared to others' stories, we came off quite lightly. We're also now thankful that we didn't take our usual direct flight to/from Gatwick, but flew to/from Manchester instead, which was outside the core of the hubbub.

Here's the latest on the police investigation:
More time for terror probe police