Malcolm's Global Trip: Day 1

The first day was a transit day as I flew to Denver via Reykjavik, which looks to be becoming a major hub between the US and Europe. Unfortunately we had 4 gates all departing close to each other so a very busy terminal, however I did have enough time to grab a skyr to tide me over between flights.

During the flights I watched The Accountant which I quite liked and Spy which felt very improvised but amusing. The rest of the time was spent asleep which is perhaps the wrong thing to do on a westbound flight.

Immigration in Denver airport was a bit of a farce. There has been investment in some new automated immigration desks that didn't always work and where half were operational but not in use due to having no-one to man them. Once we'd made it past them there was a second queue with the old manned desks that we still had to go through where those who didn't get through the automated process would have taken just as long as if the machines didn't exist. The overall impact in this 2-part process was a further delay of around 20 minutes. This isn't great, but I'm sure some manager or IT salesman is using salary payments as the key measure of success rather than the impact on the customer, i.e. us. But the UK immigration process isn't that great either and it's quickly forgotten once you're through it but having experienced some great immigration processes (usually in Asia) I do call it out when I see it not working.

For the first day I chose to sleep in a hotel close to the airport, this way I could jump the free shuttle (bar the tip for the driver) to get me there quickly and could grab something to eat close by. More so that the flight was landing around 9pm at night. In this case the hotel I'd chosen didn't have a restaurant but did suggest a steak restaurant in another hotel close by, which was fine and a nice start to the holiday.