Day 1 – Saturday, June 8 2013: Getting There
For our honeymoon trip we’d flown out on Virgin Atlantic.  In 1998 they were one of the first airlines to offer personal IFE in each seatback, so we’d treated ourselves.  In 2013 we again picked VA, although I can’t recall now (2018) whether there was any special reason we flew on them again.  It was probably because I was a “frequent flyer” with them, although that meant pretty much nothing since I flew so infrequently.  I do know that international flight amenities had changed a lot in the 15 years between trips – among other things, we didn’t get served scones with clotted cream in 2013 like we had enjoyed in 1998.

We had a 745PM outbound flight from SFO to Heathrow.  As luck would have it, Eileen’s brother Mike was flying back into SFO later that night so we ended up parking the car in the short-term parking garage around 530PM and texting Mike details of where we left it.  We’d given him a car key before he’d left a few days previously, so once he arrived he found our car and drove it back to his house.  So no hassles for us or him!

We grabbed some snacks at the airport and waited for our flight to board.

We were flying on flight #VS20, which used a 747-400.  One really cool feature of this plane was that there was a small Economy section on the upper deck – about 30 seats of so – just behind a premium section.  I believe that it was 1^st class in front of us, although these days the maps show Premium Economy.  What we all remember is that our 3-3 seat configuration was a lot nicer than the 3-4-3 configuration on the lower deck, and we had a MUCH quieter ride up top.  There wasn’t enough overhead space for at least one of our bags, but they were more than happy to let us stow the bag in the back closet area. 

This was Andrew’s first major flight – certainly the first one in his memory.  He was pretty nervous and spent a lot of it holding Eileen’s hand or asleep on her shoulder.  We flew in 4 seats across, so Eileen was sitting with the boys and I was sitting across the aisle.  We had cashed in some credit card points which allowed all of us to be outfitted with our own set of noise-cancelling headphones. 

The food on the flight was something Indian.  Robert is remembering this five years after the fact, but I have no reason to doubt him on this.  We know that – whatever it was – Andrew didn’t eat it, and Robert probably picked at it.  Of course, being a great mom, Eileen had packed a variety of snacks so they didn't go totally hungry.