We benefited from the best sleep of our trip in our spacious FCO Hilton room. We subscribe to the rule-of-thumb that it take the body one day to get acclimated to every hour of difference between two time zones. Just as our bodies are getting used to the nine-hour time zone difference, it’s time to fly home.
Between omelets and Cappuccino in the hotel restaurant, and another Cappuccino in the quiet BA Lounge, we took full advantage of our mid-afternoon flight time.
We arrived at the gate with time to spare, boarded effortlessly, and settled into our business class seats on a BA A320 in preparation for the nearly four-hour flight from Rome to London.
Brian enjoyed a quite pleasant lunch featuring cheese-filled pasta, while Kathy settled for a Tanqueray and Tonic, after perusing an unimpressive wine list (we could buy one Italian "gem" for $7 at home).
Moving between the various terminals at LHR can be quite daunting. We landed at Terminal 5, but our Heathrow Hilton is attached via a pedestrian tube to Terminal 4. The way we have always accomplished the move is to take a train from Terminal 5 to the Terminal 2-3 stop, and then transfer to a train to Terminal 4. The procedure is tedious but manageable in, say, an hour or so and it’s free. The one nasty catch at the end is that everyone heading for Terminal 4 from the train has to use a bank of four elevators , one of which was not working on this particular evening. Ugh!
We eventually crowded ourselves into the second or third lift (the polite British habit of queuing seems to have eroded in recent years) and found the door to the hotel tube, which is quite similar to the one at the Rome Airport Hilton.
LHR features access to several hotels along the way, while the FCO Hilton’s tube is also the path to various parking garages.
We arrived to another friendly greeting at the front desk, deposited our rollaboards in our relatively small room (still plenty of space between the foot of the bed and the wall), and headed to the Executive Lounge for a beer during the final 30 minutes of the 6 to 7 happy hour.
We both slept for a few hours, woke up at some point after Midnight, and pretty well stayed awake until rising at 5 a.m. to shower and close up our rollaboards. We had time for a quick bite in the hotel’s restaurant at 6, and left for our trek back to Terminal 5 around 6:15. On our most recent stay we’d departed the Hilton at 5:00 am and discovered that the elevators weren’t working because the train wasn’t running yet. Timing is everything, and 6:15 am gave us ample time to board a 9:25 am flight.
Our two trains ran fairly efficiently and we hit no snags in the LHR Fast Track security line on this occasion. After spending a little time in the BA First Class Lounge, we allowed plenty of time for the 15-minute trip by foot, escalator, and train to the B gates.
The BA gate staff managed the boarding process efficiently. Before long we were seated in the newish business-class “suites” (complete with sliding doors) on a 787. It was only about a nine-hour flight LHR-SEA, and weather proved not to be a factor at all, despite the advance warnings.
Kathy enjoyed the pasta she selected for lunch, while Brian ate about half of one of the poorest hunks of tough and flavorless beef that he’d ever faced before giving up on it. He had a flashback to that cruelly humorous old claim that the expression “British Cuisine” is an oxymoron.
Dessert, however, proved to be very tasty, and the BA “Tea” served prior to landing, complete with scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam, continues to provide a pleasant interlude and a touch of tradition.
Note that the crusts are removed from tea sandwiches. Indeed.
Despite the dire weather warnings flying out of LHR, BA 53 touched down at SEA just after 10:30 am, about a half hour early. We’d booked a flight departing at 4:42 pm, but this gave us hopes of catching an earlier flight departing at 12:05 pm.
All we had to do was navigate through the new (2022) International Arrivals Facility. We don’t actually arrive directly at SEA that often from international flights, and we can’t recall the last time we’ve connected to an ongoing connecting flight there.
We thought we knew SEA well enough. That was a mistake.
One of our final tasks before leaving on a trip is to scour our TripIt entry for every transportation detail. Do you have to call the hotel from airport for a shuttle? What are the options for traveling from our downtown hotel to the airport? However, we didn’t bother researching in any detail the international-to-domestic transfer at SEA.
The International Arrivals Facility includes fairly long walks with a lot of room for expansion. We eventually descended a long escalator, walked past the baggage carousels smugly pulling our rollaboards, and went through Global Entry with virtually no wait.
We started to walk toward the exit and then saw a sign for Connecting Flights. With some trepidation, we took that route. Skipping past the baggage re-checking counters, we eventually arrived at the TSA line. It was lengthy, initially a single lane until a second lane was opened 20 minutes later, and did not include a PreCheck queue. That held us up 30-40 minutes.
If you have no baggage to re-check, our advice, confirmed after some online research, is simply to exit the facility and seek out the shortest TSA line to re-enter airside. As it happened, we arrived at the C gate for the earlier SEA-BLI flight just before boarding started.
The friendly Alaska agent found us two vacant seats together. Never were we so happy to sit in the very last row of a plane with our rollaboards checked.
We also learned that even the back row of Alaska’s E175 planes offers more legroom the British Airways domestic business class.
It was a sunnier day than we’d seen during our entire time in Italy, and we enjoyed the island views out the window on this short flight. It turns out the views from the back row are just as good at those at the front.
Finally, we were cheerfully reconciled to being the last passengers off the plane, making it all quite leisurely. After all, we had managed to arrive home 4 ½ hours earlier than we’d expected.
We’re fortunate to have great neighbors on both sides of us, and one of them picked us up (Thanks, Carmen)! It’s always great to be back home, especially on a sunny day, after a pleasantly low-key trip that also added our first Alaska EQMs (13,821 Elite Qualifying Miles) of 2025.
Now is the time to do our laundry and catch up on home obligations. We’re already looking forward to visiting Prague and Vienna in late February.
