The time has come to begin a new cruise travelogue series, this time covering our October 2023 cruise through the Panama Canal.
This first post will be brief – for me – and simply cover a few details of the hotels we stayed in each side of the Atlantic along with some photos from the plane window flying over America just to break up the imagery of beds and shower units. You might be surprised to learn that the number of people looking for nothing but pictures of beds and shower units on articles about travelling from London to San Francisco is actually quite small.
We flew out of Heathrow so we drove up the night before and booked into the Renaissance Hotel, conveniently close to the long stay parking we’d be making use of the day afterwards. Hotels are more-or-less the same the world over and this one was perfectly fine, with a large and clean bedroom and bathroom.
Another reason for booking this hotel was that it was close to a pub. We can and do eat or drink in hotels but if there is a nearby pub then we like to spread our spending a bit whenever we travel. This was The Three Magpies and we stayed for several.
It was nice to have a reasonably late flight – just after midday – because a lot of flights we take for some reason usually mean we have to set alarms for unearthly hours of the morning. We didn’t have breakfast in the hotel but simply parked our car in the long stay parking for terminals 2 and 3 then hopped on the shuttle bus to the airport. This took a while because there’d been an accident on the only road to the airport but we’d left in plenty of time so didn’t panic overly.
The check-in process took a long time at the airport too because it appeared everyone ahead of us in the queue had some issue or another. When we got to the counter the woman there scanned our passports, looked, checked again, then said “Oh, you’ve filled in everything you needed to do already. I wish everyone was like you.” The world would be a better place, that’s for sure.
We grabbed a breakfast and some pre-flight drinks after security in the airport because that’s travelling law.
Our flight from London to San Francisco was with Virgin. It was a comfortable flight – I did make notes that there were annoying people around us but I can’t remember the details of that – but the food was pretty dire and the windows were the sort that can be tinted dark blue by the crew. They duly did this for part of the flight, stuffing up some otherwise lovely views over Greenland and Canada, but they did return us to normality towards the final stretch of the trip.
There was quite a slow-moving queue at customs in San Francisco but the agent who dealt with us was very friendly. By the time we’d chatted with him and done all the usual security things like take fingerprints and photos we found our luggage already on the carousel at baggage claim.
We stepped out of the doors of the terminal with every intention of looking for signs to taxis but there was a man standing there who said “Taxi?” to us, grabbed our cases, and took them to his limousine. We had no idea how legal this was but the drive to our hotel was great and we enjoyed a long talk with the driver about the local area and his life, got tourist suggestions from him, talked about sport, etc. We were still concerned that the price of the taxi might be extortionate and we might need to engage the use of hotel staff at the destination to sort things out but it was about what we’d been led to expect from looking online so that was fine, and we were happy – well, happy enough given that this is America and expected for arcane worker-exploitation reasons – to tip on top of the job done.
Our day of long delays to get things done continued at the hotel. We walked into the Riu Plaza Fisherman’s Wharf while they were training a new member of staff to use the booking-in system and things didn’t go as planned. We genuinely didn’t mind this, though, because everyone’s got to learn sometimes. We were patient, we smiled, we encouraged, we told the new staff member not to panic and to take his time, and we got a room upgrade either as a result or just because.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head off for a look around the Fisherman’s Wharf area of San Francisco in the evening and enjoy some very good drinks in the hotel bar.