Day The Rest Of It: Gilroy CA - Larrington Towers

Considering the sheer quantity of traffic to be found in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, er, area the trundle back to SFO was relatively painless, especially in comparison with the outward leg two weeks ago.  It helps if you read the signs pertaining to the operating hours of the High Occupancy Vehicle lanes on the divers freeways strewn around the place like a bundle of asphalt spaghetti dropped from a very large military transport aircraft.  It's after 10:00, innit.  See also: bus lanes on the A312 on the way to/from Hillingdon.

Way early dropping off the car, but this is infinitely preferable to fighting through traffic to for e.g. Denver/Chicago/Seattle with 15 minutes to go before They charge you an extra day or report the vehicle stolen.  Little clockwork train to the terminal and go to the BA Bag Drop, which is not like the one at Heathrow, oh no.  Here a BA Minion scans your passport and attaches a label to The Luggage and is, in fact, indistinguishable from a regular check-in desk.  Except that regular check-in desks tend actually to have BA Minions staffing them which in the case of the SFO ones they had not got.  Much waiting and FUMMIN ensued.

Something peculiar then happened, viz. the staff at the security wossname were actually cheerful and polite.  Must be a wormhole in space-time, or something.

Stroll down to Gate A11 which smelled very strongly of Cannabis sativa and had the acoustics of Utah's Echo Canyon, rendering the BA Minions' increasingly desperate calls for Passengers Drkh, Cmndh and Skrrgh utterly incomprehensible.  I did manage to catch the call for Group 4 boarding, by looking at the screen.  To the back of the top deck of the Shiny Metal Birb where the Bad Lads sit.

We must’ve been very Bad Lads indeed, because the BA Minions ran out of BBQ Chikn'n'Rice before reaching us, and I put it to the massed caterers of San Francisco International Airport that eating a mass of spaghetti glued together with some foul-tasting and lukewarm sauce, with plastic cutlery, from a foil container is this: impossible.  Looks like that wormhole sent us back to 1973 after all.  Also be advised that a “Full English Breakfast” contains BACON.  And does not contain potatoes.  #FirstWorldProblems, though imagine the fuss if they’d run out of the meatless dish and found the back of the Shiny Metal Birb full of militant vegans 😈

Hounslow, bang, bounce, terminal.  Clockwork train, passport control, baggage reclaim and Praise Be!  The very first bag I clocked on the carousel was The Luggage.  And then what felt like a week on the Piccalilli and Queen Vic lines before the bus home and if any part of the journey was likely to break my laptop it was that last mile-anna-bit because these new-fangled anbaric W15s are incapable of starting, stopping or cornering with anything approaching decorum.  Larrington Towers has not burned down, fallen over or sunk into the swamp and if OVO Energy Services are reading this: piss off, you’re not getting any more money.  Thus concludeth ye Automatick Diary 2024 edition.