It was an early start, meeting at Newcastle Airport at 7am. After checking in our luggage there was time for a quick photo and coffee before saying our goodbyes. The photo below shows us with District Governor Tony Fairley and GSE Coordinator Dave Sadler.
We were then on our way to Heathrow, and after circling a couple of times waiting for a landing slot, arrived more or less on time and caught our connection to Washington Dulles without any problems. Washington is where the stress was! After leaving the flight and following the sign for connections, we had the hurdle of US Immigration. We joined the back of a queue of 500 people, which were being processed by 8 Immigration officials (of the 11 desks for non-US citizens, 3 were closed!). After a wait of more than 2 hours, we managed to catch our connection to Binghamton with minutes to spare - many more in the queue missed their onward connections.
The plane to Binghamton was a bit of contrast to the previous one - it was propellor-driven and had about 35 seats in total! I suppose it just goes to show how spread out the population is, if there are so few customers for an hour-long flight! There were some good views out of the plane on the way and that reinforced how spread out things are - every 2 or 3 fields there was a house and in many places there were developments with each house set back from the road at the end of a very long drive and surrounded by acres of space. All a bit different to the UK where policy means that houses are packed in.
We arrived on time at Binghamton and were greeted by the arriving party. This included the District Governor and also Terry and Amy from the team that visited the North East last autumn. By this point we were all quite hungry so had our first meal on American soil in "The Spot", a local diner. Apparently diners have fallen out of fashion in America and are becoming increasingly rare, but we had a fine meal at The Spot. As a guide to the portion sizes you can see Helen halfway through her salad... none of us had enough room for any of the puddings which looked delicious but were similarly massive.
Feeling a bit fuller, we headed to Cooperstown, a drive of about an hour and a half arriving at about 11pm - which is of course 4am UK time. By that time we were all nearly asleep on our feet and turned straight in for some much needed sleep.
Today has been busy but relaxing... we're heading out for dinner with Tim (another member of the team which was in the North East last year) in an hour or so, but I think that Tom will be updating the blog on what we got up to today.
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