Winging over The Pond (Part 2)

In Part One we covered two options on when to fly to London Heathrow airport. The two options are what we call the “lost day” and the “red-eye” flight. For the details, go back to that post. Bottom line, if you fly all day, you end up losing that day just in travel. But the good news about the lost day plan is that we can just go to bed, have a nice long sleep and jet lag will be pretty much done. Even if we get to bed at 11 or 11:30 p.m. and sleep to 9 a.m. we’re on the way to seeing London by 10 or 11 a.m. Yes, we have lost a day (hence it is the “lost day” approach) but jet lag is pretty much eliminated. Of course, we all react differently, so the standard warning is that your experience may be different.

The overnight “Red Eye” flight gets its name because your eyes will be red from lack of sleep when you arrive. You’ve been in the air 7.5 or more hours and, when you add in the time to get to the airport, through security, wait to board, get through arrivals in London, get your bags, get into central London and drop the bags at your hotel, that’s close to, if not more than, 24 hours with little sleep. Needless to say, that first day is going to be pretty brutal, no matter what. Don’t schedule anything for that day that is really special to you because you may be too tired to enjoy it. Plan to get to bed early to help in recovering from jet lag.

Neither of those approaches is a great option. One way you lose a day to travel, the other way you lose a day to intense jet lag. Pick the one you personally prefer. We’ve done both and find that while we prefer the lost day approach, when we travel to England, we tend to go for a long enough period of time that losing one day doesn’t impact the schedule. If you only have 6-7 days to visit, then losing a day may be more critical to you.

Given our particular circumstances, here is what we have done before. Taking the red eye from Dulles IAD to London Heathrow, we take a Virgin Atlantic flight because we prefer the service on Virgin. Arrival is typically about 11 a.m., depending on the winds aloft. Instead of spending another hour getting into London, we stay at one of the airport hotels immediately outside Heathrow. Our experience is that those hotels are much more prepared for a morning check-in than the hotels in the center of London. Upon making the reservations, we do alert the hotel to our early arrival and have always been able to go immediately to a room. We crash for a few hours of sleep, arising in time for an early supper in late-afternoon and then, after a couple of hours to maybe take a walk, watch a little television, and get online to check our emails, we retire to bed early in the evening. The following morning, we have recovered from jet lag and are ready to tackle London!  We book a driver to take us to our next hotel and leave our bags with the concierge there so that we can begin enjoying our first official day. When returning in the evening, we check in, retrieve our bags and settle into our room.

A similar, but different, approach works well when we have plans to visit the countryside first, requiring a rental car.  We book a hotel room near the airport for the night of our travel and request a late checkout (2 pm or so). (Yes, the night we book the hotel is the night we are in the air because we want the room in the morning when we arrive.) On arrival we then go directly there from the airport and crash for a short nap. The cost of a room for less than a day’s use is just part of the deal and we consider it money well spent to get a 3 to 4-hour nap. At that point Jake will secure our reserved rental car and bring it back to the hotel. Once packed up we’ll set off for the first destination and arrive by late afternoon to early evening to check in to our accommodation.  By going to bed reasonably early that night, we are up and raring to go the next morning.

What about coming back to the US, you ask? Well, travel that direction is much easier. The 5 to 8-hour time differential works in your favor, so a flight that departs LHR at 11 a.m.—even though the normal headwinds makes the flight 8.5 hours—arrives in Washington Dulles about 2-2:30 p.m. Even if you, like us, have an hour drive to get home, you are there easily by 4 to 4:30 p.m. (Customs and Border Control, plus baggage arrival will take up to an hour.) You have had a long day,  but going to bed early will help with your jet lag the next day.