"Tonight we fly, over the mountains, the beach & the sea, over the friends that we've known & those that we now know & those that we've yet to meet"

It was June 2000 when I was sent to the USA by work for training purposes. In all honesty I think it was more of a morale booster for the poor, put upon lab techs instigated by LittleBigman who was the best boss in the world ever.
The only downer about the whole thing was having to go with Mr.Dull. Our trip was Monday to Monday & our training finished on Friday. This gave us the whole weekend to do as we pleased.
For weeks before going I would spend hours pouring over maps, trying to gauge the distances involved & coming up with some sort of travel plan.

Part one: The outbound journey.

We left on Monday morning from work at about 07.00. Round The Chops drove us the short trip up to Birmingham international airport. We had a couple of hours to kill, so we had breakfast, a crafty vodka & in my case 8 grillion fags. 8 hours was a long time to go without. The furthest I'd flown previously was to the Canaries, off the coast of North Africa & that took 4 hours.
It wasn't long till we were airborne & on our way to Chicago O'Hare.
Then it transpired that our plane had a defective entertainment system, no films, no radio, nothing. Still, I had my minidisc player. The minidisc player that I'd somehow forgotten to charge! Anyway, due to the intense excitement of our destination the time passed fairly quickly & I even helped Mr.Dull do his word-searches in his puzzle book.
As the aircraft started it's descent I started getting a bit giddy, trying to see out of the window, trying to see skyscrapers, trying to see America! Sadly all I saw was mist & then a runway. After an eternity going through customs (this was pre-9/11, god only knows what it's like now!) I had to find the way out of the airport so I could have a fag. This took chuffing yonks! Nobody told me that O'Hare is like the biggest airport in the world. Eventually I made it out the front & drew heavily on my cigarette as I marveled at the simplest of things that showed me I was indeed in the States: Yellow taxis.
We now had a 4 hour wait before our internal flight to Dayton, Ohio. Meanwhile back in Europe, England were playing their first match of Euro 2000, a major footy tournament second only to the World cup. The people in the sports bar in the airport looked at us like we just flown in from another continent! Soccer? On the Tv? (We lost 3-2 to Portugal, by the way)
I made several trips out of the airport during this time for the purposes of smoking, after about 3 hours or so I went again but this time I decided to take a different route. Much to my eternal annoyance, I then saw a sign showing me that for less than $2 & taking only 20 minutes, we could've taken a train into downtown Chicago. Utter, utter bollocks! It is still one of my biggest regrets in life that we spent 4 hours hanging around in an airport when we could've had a little adventure going to the biggest city either of us had ever been near (bar London, of course).
Then our flight to Dayton is delayed by an hour, eventually we get on this little half full plane & off it goes taxi-ing round to the runway. Except it doesn't. The fog & mist that obscured our view when we landed was still being a menace & our plane joined a very long queue of other planes just waiting to take off. During this 2 hours sitting at the back of our grounded plane I noticed on the grass something very exciting, I quietly beckoned Mr.Dull over to my side so as not to look like a silly foreign tourist. I whispered "Look, a skunk!" & he came over & was equally giddy. Hey we don't have skunks in England, ok?
It was all too much for Mr.Dull who exclaimed as loud as his monotone voice would let him "Bloody Hell! A skunk, a bloody skunk, where's me camera?". Witness then 30 or 40 smirking faces turning round to look at the giddy foreigners who never seen a skunk before.
In the end we finally got into the air & the fog again hid Chicago from me. An hour later we landed in Dayton, where we were met by a very disgruntled colleague who'd been waiting for 3 hours for us. We were then driven to Lima, Ohio. Lima is where our company headquarters are & we were staying in the Holiday Inn just off the I-75.
We had left Crapsville at 07:00 our time & arrived at our hotel at midnight local time, which on our body clock was 05:00! So we were knackered & went to our rooms (which were mercifully separated by 3 floors) & went to sleep.
After doing a very, very big poo!

To be continued...