Crossrail
Started: 2024-09-09 21:01:22
Submitted: 2024-09-09 22:37:18
Visibility: World-readable
Flying home from London
After more than a week in the UK, having attended Worldcon in Glasgow and nipped down to London for the weekend, the time had come to fly home to San Francisco.
I checked out of my hotel in Camden Town and took the Northern line (Charing Cross branch) to Tottenham Court Road, where I transferred to the Elizabeth Line heading towards Heathrow. The train zipped through central London to the new low-level platforms at Paddington, then continued west, rising to the surface and joining the Great Western Main Line past the huge construction site that will be Old Oak Common, which will either be the London terminus of HS2 or the penultimate stop on HS2 before Euston, depending on whether the new Labour government is willing to make up the massive capital investment in infrastructure that the previous Tory government weaseled out of.
The train slowed down and stopped on the Great Western Main Line due to congestion ahead. At one point we were playing leapfrog with a Great Western train on the adjacent track, before the other train pulled ahead on its way to somewhere further away than Heathrow. My train left the main line and next thing I knew we were pulling into Heathrow Terminal 2.
Or rather, we were pulling into the station for Heathrow Terminal 2. The real terminal was a ten-minute walk away, on the other end of a long line of travelators leading through twisting passages, all alike; followed by a long line of escalators climbing several floors from the sub-basement level of the trains up to the departures hall several floors above the ground.
I checked my larger suitcase and made my way through security, then picked up breakfast at a coffee shop. The monitors told me that I should go to my gate already, so I took the escalators down to the tunnel under the tarmac to the satellite concourse. My plane was already boarding, despite being almost an hour before the scheduled departure time, so I joined the long queue to board the 787 that would take me home across the Atlantic Ocean.
My plan was to use in-flight wifi to work on the plane so I could count the day as a work day, so once we reached our cruising altitude over Scotland (at least, the map said we were over Scotland, flying between Glasgow and Edinburgh, but I could see only clouds out the window of the plane) I pulled out my laptop and connected to the Internet and logged into my work email to see what had happened in the seven work days I'd been on holiday. (It turned out that I could connect to my web-hosted services, which was most of what I needed, but I couldn't connect to my work VPN, so I didn't have direct access to some of the resources on my corp network. I could ssh to my own VM in the cloud, as long as I was willing to deal with multi-second round-trip delays. But I was able to connect to at all, while flying over the Atlantic Ocean, which is basically a miracle.)
The clouds cleared by the time we reached Greenland, giving me the chance to see the sea ice floating in the frigid ocean and the ice cap stretching to the horizon.
As we crossed Greenland the cabin crew announced on the PA that they had completed the lunch service and would be dimming the cabin lights; and by the way the windows would automatically dim. I spent the next seven hours in flight over Greenland and Baffin Bay and northern Canada and Hudson Bay and several provinces and several more states unable to see very much out of my window. Only when we started our descent into San Francisco did I get a clear view out of my window, of the familiar land mass of Point Reyes sticking out into the Pacific Ocean.
As the plane looped around to approach San Francisco from the south I remembered that I still had my temporary UK sim card in my phone. I swapped it out for my US sim card, and when we landed in SFO (after the long approach over the bay where the water keeps getting closer and closer until finally at the last possible moment there's the end of a runway) I turned on my phone and received all of the SMS messages I had missed while I was on the other side of the ocean, including the no-longer-timely notifications from United telling me that I should check into my flight and then that they were boarding my flight.
I headed to the Global Entry lanes at the far end of immigration and let the kiosk scan my face and recognize me without even presenting my passport or Global Entry card (which I'm sure Customs and Border Patrol would never misuse) then the agent at the desk waved me through. I waited at the wrong baggage claim while waiting for it to get unjammed (at one point a dude in a high-viz vest carrying a radio walked down the conveyer belt to see what was going on below the floor). The baggage claim carousel was delivering bags from a flight from Auckland, and some of the tags indicated that the bags would be traveling onward to London. Then I realized I was at the wrong baggage claim (they might have changed the assignments while I wasn't watching, or I might have just read it wrong), and I found my suitcase waiting for me there.
I exited baggage claim via the nothing to declare customs lane and emerged into the weird international arrivals gate tucked away in an inconspicuous part of SFO's international terminal. It was 14:00, Pacific time, and I deliberately refused to do the time zone conversion to check what time it was in London. I stopped for a snack at Starbucks in the airport terminal to fill the gaps in my weird travel meal schedule. (On the plane I neglected to sign up for vegan meals in advance, so I had to rely on the regular in-flight meals. This turned out in my favor; the "lunch" meal after takeoff was a mac and cheese, and the "snack" meal before landing was a cheese pizza roll.)
Properly fortified, I headed to BART to take the train down the peninsula so Kiesa wouldn't have quite as far to drive to pick me up. (I did appreciate that SFO's BART stop was considerably closer to the international terminal than Heathrow's tube station was.) I took BART one stop to Milbrae, arriving just as the southbound Caltrain was pulling into the station. Milbrae is set up to do one cross-platform transfer, but only for northbound Caltrain service; to get to the southbound tracks I had to take a slow elevator to the concourse above the platforms, cross the tracks, then lug my suitcase down the stairs. The train waited for me to board, and the conductor pointed me to the luggage racks in the next carriage (which happened to be a carriage with working air conditioning so it was somewhat less stuffy than the first carriage I boarded).
While I was in Scotland, Caltrain began running their new EMU trains in revenue service, but they maintained the old diesel-compatible schedule before rolling out all-electric service with a new and improved timetable in late September. I ended up on an old train hauled by a diesel locomotive; which turned out to be the first time on this trip I rode on a train hauled by a diesel locomotive, though I did ride diesel multiple unit services on my way to Warminster for Imberbus. I did, at least, make it onto the limited service train, so we skipped some stops for a faster journey, arriving in San Jose at Diridon Station on time at 15:26.
Kiesa drove over the mountain to pick me up after picking Julian up from school. I returned home at 16:30 Pacific time, seventeen hours after leaving my hotel in Camden Town at 07:30 BST, having traveled 4,664 nautical miles by plane and more kilometers by tube, train, BART, Caltrain, and car on either end. It was well past midnight in London, but I stayed up until the sun went down at 20:00, back home again after a long adventure.
