After an eternity, we get sucked into Heathrow. First stop, breakfast. Second stop, the handy baggage shop after realising that I have a UK-European mains adaptor, not UK/US. Oh, I have to start boarding. I say goodbye to my parents and wander off looking for my gate.

American Airlines are GOOD. I had a telly in the back of the seat in front of me. I settle in, telling myself that this flight will only be two hours long. I turn off all but the most basic of geographical sense and almost manage to convince myself. The pilot says something with a seven in. Oh well. Then the stewardess comes on the PA.

I panicked. She was just saying the usual stuff, welcoming us to flight something and telling us to enjoy ourselves and not to smoke and what to do in the case of an emergency. That wasn't the problem. I'd heard this all before. That was the problem. I'd heard it all before in the introduction to Sierra's Half-Life. The person on the PA was the same person that welcomed me to the Black Mesa compound.

After a few minutes looking around for a guy with a briefcase, I give up and watch Rugrats and a cockney gangster movie. Way too much time passes. There was some food somewhere. We land in JFK. I begin to suspect that something is wrong, because I make it to customs without getting mugged.

Passport control looks down their nose at me and disinfects the counter as I leave. I collect my bag and the customs officer politely tells me to rfmlgle mrf flngbre. I nod and follow everyone else. No, no livestock. No, no dairy. No, I haven't been on a farm.

Now I have to get to LaGuardia, and I don't want to have to tell anyone for fear of mispronouncing it. A few minutes after a bus driver tells me that he's not going there, he lets me on and takes me. Crazy Americans. I try to find $11 to pay my fare, but all of the money is green and the same size. We leave.

The driver was right. So was Wes, I believe, in one of his posts about how it is impossible to leave New York. It's even harder to leave the airport. We pass by it at least four times on the road out and make the sort of path you expect to see in cartoon chase scenes with a door-lined corridor. We eventually reach escape velocity and spin off on a tangent away from JFK. We correct our course and head for LGA.

I'm still not in the US. Or at least, I don't think I am. Maybe it's an airport thing; they make the surrounding area as bland as possible to put your mind at ease when you land. Save the culture shock for afterwards, as that's the last thing you need while you're waiting at the conveyor belt for that bag that may be yours but didn't yours have a longer handle and you don't remember that logo on the side but you think that it's yours and it's almost certainly yours anyway so you take it and run as fast as you can out into the street without attracting too much attention.

Culture shock, yes. Airports are all designed to look fairly similar to stop you from going mad. They don't fill them with green pillarboxes, or paint the road outside bright yellow. The exception here is Sacramento's airport, but I haven't got there yet. Being outside JFK was just like being outside Birmingham International, only with the sun shining and cleaner air. They accepted my dollars, which was a bit odd, but I ignored it. Then it happens.

We drive over a freeway.

Well, I don't know whether it was a freeway or not, because the Americans have far too many words for far too big roads. [Yes, we do. Roads in the East are never freeways, so this one was a highway. -Sam] It had about five lanes either side of the reservation, which is off the scale of British road widths, even with the hard shoulder. But what really hits me is that everyone was driving on the wrong side and in a perfectly straight line. It's like they had a heck of a lot of tarmac and a heck of a lot of dynamite, too. We drive past a yellow school bus. Then a yellow road sign with something on it. Then a yellow taxi. Then a yellow set of traffic lights that think there is enough yellow around so jumps straight to green. The crossr--sorry, intersection that we are on has the names of the streets marked with little green signs like flags. A sign says that I can "inquire with in" about their "range of colors." I think that if I see any more America, I'll not survive the trip. We drive past three McDonalds.

I come to just as we're approaching LGA. I wish I had never made it. LGA is one of the worst airports I have ever been to. The check in queue takes two and a half hours to clear due to there being only one staff member doing anything while all of the rest chat amongst themselves. I don't make it to my gate in time. My flight appears on the monitor as "boarding." Then "final boarding." Then is disappears. I stand at my gate, confused as to why everyone is still sitting here when the plane has clearly taken off. I stop trusting LaGuardia, and wait for the door to open. After fifteen minutes, it does, and I walk down the corridor to see a huge gap where a plane should be. There are some stairs leading down to the runway. I descend and turn to see something that flew in the war. Oh boy.

The door refuses to close properly after we settle into our seats. The stewardess stands there holding it shut, occasionally banging on a rickety piece of bulkhead. A rasping sound signals that the props have started, and we drift forward. A different rasping sound signals that the left one has just fallen off. Maintenance come out and glue it back on and leave without checking the other one. This time we take off successfully, and we also get miniature pretzels. We fly low to Manchester airport, and I spend the time looking out of the window. The grey of New York slowly turns green, and on more than a few occasions I think I'm back home.

We land in Manchester after what seems like five minutes. No civilisation has produced the expression "as pretty as an airport," but Manchester isn't doing a bad job of it. It's like some pilots decided to land at a shopping centre after a rowdy night out, and everyone was too polite to ask them to leave. I actually kind of look forward to the four hours I have to spend here waiting for Ayako and the six hours I think I will have to spend here on my way home. Ooh, I smell pizza.

I wait for what I suspect to be Ayako's flight to land, and prepare myself to meet her. She hasn't come through the gate yet. Where is she? Is this even her flight? What if she has landed already, and is at the hotel? I try to calm down. Deep breaths. Argh! There she is! She's coming this way!

She walks right past me.