Where do I begin? After several months of looking forward to my holiday, the departure date finally arrived. I awoke at 5am, giving me plenty time to get ready and triple check that my mum and I had everything we needed. We arrived at Aberdeen airport, Scotland at 8am, giving us oodles of time to check-in, go through security and board the flight.

My flight to London Heathrow didn’t depart until 11.30am so it was a bit of a wait. We flew down there with British Airways who were fantastic. I was quite nervous about flying this time round because I was extremely anxious when I flew to France a couple of years ago. This time was much better although I’m still not a huge fan of the taking off and landing parts. The landing was a little bumpy- the girl sitting next to me had fallen sound asleep and was rudely awoken (I did my best not to laugh).

We arrived in London just after 1pm. The connecting flight to New York’s JFK airport didn’t depart until 6.30pm so I had yet another long wait. This time it wasn’t so bad as I was in Terminal 5 which is more like a large shopping centre than an airport. I had lunch at a restaurant called Giraffe, went to Harrods (for a pen and a carrier bag) and wandered around trying to find Krispy Kreme donuts (I never did find them).

Once our departure gate was announced, my mum and I had to get on several of the biggest escalators I have ever seen. Escalators also make me a little nervous- I fell down one as a child (now don’t laugh!). Following that, we had to go on the underground shuttle. It went *really* fast (you had to hold on tight) and it only took about 1 minute!

The flight to JFK was quite good although I don’t think my mum would agree with me- she felt extremely sick and slept most of the journey. I tried to keep myself amused by watching the inflight entertainment- Friends, Back To You and Anchorman. I managed to doze off for about 15 mins but embarrassingly jumped when I woke up and for a few seconds failed to realise I was on a plane. Ultimately, I was pretty bored by the time we landed at JFK (well it was a 7 hour flight!).

We landed about 9pm New York time (we were late in leaving Heathrow because of a queue of planes on the runway). I thought everything would be plain sailing once we had landed. How wrong was I? Firstly, there didn’t seem to be a gate available for our plane, so were stuck on it for around 30-45 minutes. Secondly, when we did eventually get into the airport, all I could see ahead of me was a massive queue of people. It turns out a flight from Asia had arrived at the same time and there was a huge queue to get through US Border Control. After spending a lot of time in the queue, it was my turn at Border Control. A couple of minutes there and we were free to go collect our luggage.

On exiting the luggage area, we went into the arrivals area where there was a large group of people waiting for folk to come off the flights. We scanned the crowd, looking for someone with a Jetsave sign. The person who greeted us was a tour director called Adrian and I’m not sure who was more glad to see who: we were relieved to finally arrive in New York and he was happy to see us because we were the last in the group to arrive and he’d been stuck at the airport for 11 hours!

We needed to be transported to our hotel which was the Holiday Inn Manhattan 6th Av, situated at 125 West 26th Street. Adrian tried to arrange a shuttle but he was told it would be a 45 minute wait so instead, he hailed a cab and within 5 minutes, we were speeding towards Manhattan (yes, riding in one of those yellow NYC taxis is quite an experience!).

The best part of the journey was heading though a tunnel then seeing the Manhattan skyline unfold in front of my eyes. It was dark but still a very special moment. It didn’t take long to reach the hotel either- maybe 40 minutes or so. As soon as we arrived, the receptionist at the hotel yelled “The Shepherds are here! The Shepherds are here!” which I found pretty funny. Turns out we were definitely the last people to arrive because of the delay in London and then the delay at JFK. By 11.30pm I was in bed- totally knackered!

Mood : accomplished   Music : Breathless  by  The Corrs